


Hollywood Or What?

by Torak (awmperry)



Category: Film Noir - Fandom, Harry Potter - Rowling, Indiana Jones (1981 1984 1989 2008), Robin Hood - All Media Types, Star Wars, Tomb Raider & Related Fandoms
Genre: Action/Adventure, Comedy, Crossover, F/M, Humour, Spoof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-04
Updated: 2010-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-10 09:40:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awmperry/pseuds/Torak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bumbling Death Eater's botched spell drags him - and a kidnapped Ginny - into a series of alternate cinematic dimensions. Naturally, Harry's saving-people-thing kicks in, and he follows them in to bring her back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ars Gratia Artis

**Author's Note:**

> Canon? We don't need no steenking canon!
> 
> Reviews are very much appreciated - as is constructive criticism. Thanks for reading.

##  **Prologue: Ars Gratia Artis**

_ "Do not fail me," the Dark Lord hissed. "Do not forget the incantation. A spell of this power, the slightest misstep could be disastrous."_

_"Never fear, my lord. It will be done." The young Death Eater simpered, oozing optimism. "I've been practicing."_

_"Just get it right," Lucius Malfoy sighed. "_Tripudo Mundofinitis Sinescutum_, nothing else. The last few times you tried it you caved in the potion lab, summoned a creature from the dungeon dimensions, and turned Bella into a bacon sandwich. You have to get it right on the day."_

_"Don't worry! Eleventh time lucky!"_

_As the young man scurried from the chamber, Malfoy glanced at Voldemort, who stood at the window with his back to him._

_"You are sure Clough is the right man for the task?"_

_"No. But he's eminently expendable."_

_"Incredibly so," Malfoy muttered._

*      *      *

It was a perfectly ordinary day at the Burrow, or at least as ordinary as days became, these days. Harry nodded to the Auror at the gate as he returned from the village, absently noting the blue-robed figure arriving a moment earlier. These days there was such a buzz around the Burrow, sealed up as it was in preparation for the imminent wedding, that it was astonishing that the muggles hadn't noticed anything; surely, Harry sometimes thought, the muggle-blanking charms couldn't be _that_ effective.

But they were, of course; mere weeks before he'd died, Dumbledore had spent several days at the Burrow, setting up a ward system rivalling Hogwarts' in its intricacy. It was rumoured — or at least, Dobby had said — that even house-elves found it difficult to materialise within the wards. And with the Aurors and magically-enhanced walls and alarm spells along the entire perimeter, it was quite possible that the Burrow was the most secure location in Britain.

Harry smiled to himself as he strolled up the drive, a shopping bag in each hand. It was just as well, he mused, that Ginny had persuaded him to stay with them until the wedding; here she was safe, Ron was safe, Hermione was safe, everyone was _safe_, and Harry could sit and plan in peace and quiet.

Ginny jogged up to him as he approached the house. She had been exercising ruthlessly since she'd heard Harry's plans, in an attempt to prove to him that she was qualified to come with him, and, well... it was looking as if Harry's excuses to keep her home were, one by one, becoming moot.

"Harry," she panted, "is that dinner?"

"A dinner by your mum in two bags? This is just the first lot, Ron and the twins are still half a mile back. This is just the first lot, so the ice cream wouldn't melt."

Ginny snagged a towel hanging outside the door, wiping the sweat off her forehead as they went inside.

"Four miles in twenty-five minutes, Harry. And that's _after_ ten miles on the broom in fifteen minutes. I'm coming with you."

"Ginny—"

"I'm coming with you."

Harry was starting to get irritated. He'd drawn up a long list of prerequisites that had, he had announced, to be completed before he'd let Ginny accompany him, Ron and Hermione on their quest. Irritatingly, however, she was far too rapidly chewing her way through the admittedly rather excessive list.

"Well, there's still the Patronus..."

"Done." She nodded to the window; Harry looked out, and saw a silvery pine marten frolicking through the flower bed. Harry frowned.

"Duelling?"

"I beat Remus, Bill, George and Dad this morning."

"Well, we all knew you'd be able to take them one-on-one, but..."

"All at once."

"Ah."

He dumped the bags on the kitchen table and headed for the stairs, Ginny hot on his heels.

"Um... sixth-year studies?"

"And seventh." Harry stopped, turned and looked sceptically at her.

"That's impossible."

"Most of them, anyway. I had plenty of incentive. And no, you can't copy off my essays. But Hermione's gone through them and says they're fine." She frowned briefly, thinking. "You know, she's been pretty quiet since then."

"Um..." Harry resumed his climb, until the safe haven of his - formerly Percy's - room was within bolting distance. "Well, you can't come."

"Why?"

"Because..." he dived for the door. "I say so!"

The door slammed.

Ginny blinked in surprise, harrumphed under her breath, and continued, grumbling.

*      *      *

_The nerve,_ she thought angrily to herself as she kicked off her shoes in her bedroom and grabbed her bathrobe. _There's absolutely no reason I should stay home, and he knows it._

The stomped across the landing and into the bathroom. She hung her robe on the hook by the door, and shrugged off her t-shirt.

"I'm just as qualified as he is," she muttered aloud, walking to the bathtub. "I should go after Volde-bloody-mort all by myself, just to show him."

She yanked the shower curtain aside — and was met by a blue-robed figure with a pinched face and bulbous eyes. And a big grin.

"Be careful what you wish for, kiddo." He grabbed her before she could run, and pointed his wand at the far wall. "_Tropdy Mund... Trappo... Tripudo Mundofinitis Sellulosa_!" A bright white blast of light launched from his wand, coalescing into a minute, flickering rectangle of glowing silver.

A moment later, the alarms went off. Through the window, she saw the Aurors outside look around and drop into combat stances, glancing every which way for the threat. None of them thought to look indoors.

"You can't get out," she told him, letting her anger cancel out the fear. "That's the only door, portal spells can't leave the property, and apparation won't work at all. If you give up, they probably won't kill you."

"In this dimension, perhaps," he sneered. "_Postulo Foris_!"

The tiny silver rectangle expanded, becoming a flickering, spinning, pulsating letterbox of argent light. _Perhaps,_ she thought, _this guy does have a plan after all._

"HAAARRYYYY!" she shouted.

*      *      *

Harry looked up from his book as an ear-splitting, ululating wail filled the air. He'd only heard it once before, when Dumbledore tested the wards, but he knew exactly what it meant. _Active Incursion_.

In a fraction of a second, he was on his feet and at the door.

Another second, and he was at the stairs, ready to join the defence outside, when—

"HAAARRYYYY!"

The shout came from indoors, from the floor above.

He changed course, pounded up the stairs. A strange, silver light flickered through the crack under the bathroom door.

He paused only a moment, knowing Ginny had gone for a shower, before he charged the door full speed and parked his foot just above the doorknob.

The door burst open, splintered wood charring and slicing into the walls as his panic discharged raw magic into the air. His eyes flashed around the room, looking for Ginny.

But the room was empty... apart from a slowly shrinking, flickering curtain of swirling light. There was no sign of Ginny, or any attacker.

There was only one course of action, and it was obvious. There was no time to get anyone, to tell anyone. He glanced toward the door, saw that no help was forthcoming.

He backed up two steps, then, with a short run-up —

— he dived into the vortex.

And the silver screen closed behind him.


	2. Episode One: A New Trope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you think the Prologue was silly? Wait 'til you read this. And Chapter 4 is even sillier. Oh, and of course, a photograph of a pound to the first person who spots all the references.

##  **Episode One: A New Trope**

Almost thirty years ago, in a plot device far, far away...

*      *      *

_Ooww..._

Clough lifted his face off the gleaming black floor. He painfully rolled over slightly, enough to look behind him and see the portal wink out.

_I came here in that thing? Bloody hell, I'm braver than I thought._

He laboriously clambered to his feet, dusted off his robes...

_That's odd..._

His robes were gone. In their place were quilted, black leather trousers, and all sorts of shiny metal... stuff. That wasn't right...

He looked around. In the distance, two men in dark grey uniforms sauntered across a corridor. There was something odd about them... He looked closer, and blinked in surprise when his eyes seemed to zoom in on them. And when they did, he saw crawling patterns of light blue over them, through them, following their every move.

He zoomed out again, looked around; now that he was looking for it, he saw the trickling light everywhere. It rolled across surfaces, bent and curved as people — in strange white and black armour, it seemed — passed through it. It moved as though it were alive.

There was something here, something pervading everything, tying it all together.

_ ** : : : and i can control it** _

The thought popped into his head unbidden, unrecognised. He spotted a polystyrene cup of something on a shelf a short distance away. He reached for it...

...and it drifted through the air into his — gauntleted, he now noticed — hand.

_Well, that was weird._

He'd never been good at wandless magic; he'd never managed wordless magic at all. Come to that, he wasn't great at magic even when he used both wands and words. And now, clearly, he'd just cast _Wingardium Leviosa_ with barely a thought.

But he never had time to finish the thought, as a blaring claxon startled him out of his reverie. He caught a snippet of an announcement — something about a docking bay — and set off at a brisk pace. He didn't know where he was going, but apparently his feet did, and that was good enough for him.

*      *      *

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Harry asked the red-haired monstrosity crammed into the compartment with him. It was under the floor of the _Centennial Goshawk_, currently sitting in a very big room with a very large number of troops examining it in very great detail. Harry instinctively felt it would have been a _very_ good time to be elsewhere.

The beast roared, as quietly as it could. Harry wasn't sure how he understood it to mean "You got a better one, shorty?" — but he did. He glanced nervously upward as armoured footsteps clanked off the floor above him.

He held his breath. Partly because he was nervous, and partly because... well, wookiees don't smell great.

*      *      *

Clough looked out over the docking bay, where hundreds of people —

_ ** : : : i command them all** _

— from technicians in grey to pilots in black to soldiers in white bustled hither and thither. Now and then one of them would salute him as they passed — many of them seemed terrified of him.

_Really,_ he thought, _all of them?_

_ ** : : : yes** _

But he wasn't interested in them for now. He had to find that blasted Weasel girl.

_ ** : : : use the power** _

The light blue lines were more prominent here, flowing over and through every surface, curling around the oblivious troops as they hustled from task to task. Clough found that if he concentrated, it was almost as if the real world faded away, leaving just the roiling blue in its place — but somehow, he could still see.

And then he saw it, and his eyes opened wide, that strange, fluctuating world of blue fading in an instant.

It was huge. It was massive. It looked, admittedly, like a hamburger. And it was the most beautiful thing Clough had ever seen.

This, then, was the _Centennial Goshawk_, the ship that had been captured.

_Ship?_ he thought. _It doesn't look like a boat to me._ But somehow, a deeper part of him knew that the oceans this ship ploughed weren't made of water.

That, and the starfield outside the gaping opening in the far wall was a clue.

He walked towards it, not noticing the small cup of ball bearings that his boot knocked over into the path of two white-garbed men carrying a large green chest. He vaguely heard a thump, loud clattering, and pained swearing as he drifted up the ramp into the grubby white ship, but didn't really notice it.

Inside, it was silent. It was empty. He let the blue fade in again, watching in fascination as it played across walls and panels. It bent and curved around the strange chess board in the common room, into the floor in the corridor, over the control panels on the bridge.

For a moment, he thought he heard breathing, but put it down to the ship settling on its landing gear.

He closed his eyes, sinking into reminiscences of a muggle toy shop he had once snuck into as a child. In it there had been things like this, great creatures of metal that could soar through space, and here, standing inside one for real... He leaned against the wall, overwhelmed.

Something went _click_.

He opened his eyes, straightened up, looked at the wall. He'd put his shoulder on one of the little levers... or one of the little red buttons. He flicked it back.

He flicked something back, anyway.

The ship shuddered slightly as a thundering volley came from outside.

He flicked something else. The noise stopped.

He looked around.

_Just pretend nothing's happened,_ he told himself, and headed for the ramp.

There seemed to be some commotion outside.

A dozen figures lay on the ground, smoking craters decorating their uniforms here and there. Beside the ramp, a long black tubular object was withdrawing back into the ship's hull. He ignored it.

"That'll leave a nasty mark," he opined helpfully as he passed an officer with an unpleasant burn to his arm. The officer glared at him. Clough smiled broadly, not that it could be seen behind the metal visor. "Jolly good. Keep up the good work, that man."

He turned to two lightly bruised technicians, who were manhandling a green trunk — a scanning system, though he didn't know how he knew — up to the ramp.

"Scan the whole ship. Bring any stowaways to me." He hadn't a clue what he was saying, but it felt right.

One of the men saluted, almost dropping a corner of the heavy crate on his toe.

"Yes, Lord Vader."

Clough frowned, but nodded. He turned and headed onwards.

As soon as he was out of the hangar, he collared the first unfortunate to cross his path.

"Who's Lord Vader?"

"Um..." the ensign looked panicked. "The daddy?"

"Oh, clear off." He held his hand up to the man as if to ward him off, and the joker started pretending to choke.

_Great,_ he grumbled mentally, _I'm in charge of a battalion of comedians._

The man crumpled to the floor behind Clough. He ignored him. You couldn't encourage that sort of behaviour, it would just get silly.

He swept on, his cape — where did that come from? — billowing out behind him.

*      *      *

Ginny was annoyed. She couldn't believe she'd let herself been taken so easily, and now that bloody vortex thing had dropped her straight into... well, it must have been one of Voldemort's dungeons, though it seemed rather too new and shiny for his tastes. And she was pretty sure Voldemort didn't have sliding doors.

She lay on her side on the uncomfortable bunk, staring at the door, one hand resting on her hip. To an observer, she might have appeared languorous, even seductive, particularly as the spell seemed to have transfigured her training gear into a long white dress that she would reluctantly admit did very flattering things for her figure.

Not that there were any observers, of course — though the hiss from the doorway told her there would be within seconds.

Quickly, but quietly, she grabbed the steel water jug that stood beside the bunk, and hid beside the door, holding the jug high above her head.

A white-armoured figure lurched in, clattering as the too-large armour plates knocked each other.

She brought the jug down heavily on its head, then kneed the figure in the stomach and watched, with some satisfaction, as it dropped to the floor, moaning.

She tore a couple of strips from the bottom of her dress and briskly tied the figures ankles and wrists. Then she looked down at it, a triumphant gleam in her eyes.

"Aren't you a little thick for a Death Eater?"

"Mmmph mmh hpPPHM mmph!"

She twisted the figure's dented helmet round the right way and lifted it half an inch so it no longer perched on its shoulders.

"Say again?"

"I said, I'm Harry Potter," came the irritated reply. "And I'm here to rescue you."

She looked at him for a moment, stunned, then tugged off the helmet and sure enough —

"Harry!" She slammed against him, hugging him to her and inadvertently crushing his tied hands behind his back.

"Ow!" Harry tugged his hands free, briskly returned the embrace, then caught her roving hands. "Ginny... Ginny, come on, we've got to get out of here."

She settled down. "Oh. You know where?"

"There's a grating a bit down the corridor. I think it leads straight to the hanga... exit."

"You _think_?"

He tugged her out into the corridor as troops approached at the far end and searing red bolts started zipping through the air around them.

"Well, princess, I _know_ those guys want to kill us, so it's as good a plan as any. And your knots are rubbish."

They reached the duct sinking into the wall, the discarded grating lying beside it. A tall, gangly creature with pointy, bat-wing ears, platypus face and bulbous eyes stood beside it.

"Master Harry, Sir, meesa opened de grate for yousa and de Wheezy! Go quick, big bombin' coming up!"

"Harry," she said nervously, goggling rather rudely at the strange creature, "I _really_ hope you're right about this."

And with that, they dived into the chute. A fraction of a second later, Dob-Dob disappeared with a _pop_.

*      *      *

He strode mightily — or so he thought — along the wide corridors. "Eighth left, across the bridge, up two levels, and down the hall," the major had said a good two and a half hours ago. The bridge was out of order somehow, so he had had a stab at navigating around it.

This proved more difficult than he had expected, and so he was now wandering the corridors, hopelessly searching for the cells. He would, he realised, finally have to face facts.

Edwin Clough, Death Eater 3rd Class and Chosen of Voldemort, was lost.

He stopped.

He looked around.

He pondered. Possibly mightily.

It came to him in a flash. _("Ow," said the nearby Crewman Wilhelm, blinking his eyes against the green afterimage on his retina.)_ A spell that he should have thought of earlier. A spell from his school days. _("Wooaaaaaaaaggghhh!" screamed the crewman as he stumbled blindly into, and subsequently — inevitably — down, a nearby lift shaft.)_

Oblivious, Clough grabbed his wand. It had somehow become shorter, thicker, and heavier than he remembered — not to mention apparently transmuting into metal — and now dangled from his belt instead of being tucked into his inside pocket. But it had to be his wand. After all, he was a wizard, wizards had wands, and it was the only vaguely wand-shaped thing he could find about his person. _Q E D._

He laid it flat across the palm of his hand, and whispered "Point me."

A great deal of nothing happened. Even the italics that normally imbued the incantation with its power failed to appear.

"Point me?" he tried again.

"Point! To The Cells!" he attempted.

"Point me? Please?" he wheedled, concentrating on the cell, the girl, whatever.

He gave up. He tossed the wand up in the air a couple of times, spinning it and catching it, spinning it and catching it... and his thumb touched the activation stud on the side.

A glaring blade of angry red light sprang from the end, but stopped a mere yard out. That was odd in itself. He knew of very few spells that would stop after such a short distance, and fewer still that he could competently cast. He waggled the curious wand experimentally; it sliced through the air with a throbbing hum. He looked closer at it.

"Bloody strange thing," he muttered.

He shook it, trying to shake off the useless frozen spell. It thrummed angrily through the air, accidentally cutting a nearby soldier in half. Oddly, it hardly seemed to leave a mark.

Clough's thumb absently touched the stud on the device, and the spell seemed to withdraw back into the wand. He turned it round, peered curiously into the end, then spotted the corpse... the bisected... the unfortunate soldier on the floor beside him.

"Whoops," he said.

_I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some trouble about that,_ he thought.

And in his world, a world where the concept of a hierarchy ending with him was unthinkable, trouble was one thing that was concealed from those above as far as possible, and even when impossible deserved a good attempt.

With the toe of his boot, he daintily prodded the halves into a convenient shadow to his right, then clasped his hands behind his back and, whistling, nonchalantly sauntered round the corner before breaking into a run.

Two more corners, and a deranged scream came towards him. Then a flood of white-armoured figures rounded the corner, screeched to a halt, and stared at him. They seemed to have been fleeing.

Another figure — oh, _bollocks_, that bloody Potter kid came along for the ride — rounded the corner, screaming at the top of his lungs, only to skid to a halt as he realised that his quarry had stopped.

Before them stood their lord and master, a man — to them — known to execute generals if they'd ruined his cornflakes. Behind them was a young lunatic with green eyes and a bit of wood.

As one, they turned.

Glaring red bolts of energy — stunning spells, if Clough was any judge (which he wasn't), though perhaps the curious dog-leg design of their bulky metal wands affected their marksmanship rather more than it should — barbecued the air around Potter as he spun on his heels and ran. The troops ran after him. And Clough followed sedately, at what he thought was a stately pace.

A small black box on wheels chittered rudely at him as it overtook. Clough picked up his pace. There was, after all, such a thing as too stately.

He arrived at a large blast door, which wheezed open as he approached. Outside...

...the _Centennial Goshawk_ was lifting. The bloody kids had got to it after all!

He whipped out his wand, thumbing the activation stud, and bellowed a few choice curses. None worked.

Clough was, as may have been noted once or twice, not the sharpest _athame_ in the box, but he knew that if the ship managed to leave the— space station? Moon? He wasn't sure. —then he would have an absolute _bugger_ of a time finding them again. So he did the only thing he could think of.

"_Recro Foris,"_ he screamed, and a blast of pure, blazing, actinic white light shot from the end of the strange wand of light.

_ ** : : : oh, wasn't that a good idea** _

_Shut up,_ he thought.

As the hamburger-shaped vehicle turned and floated towards the exit, the atmosphere shield...

...rippled, brightened, swirled, coalesced into a blinding, actinic rectangle.

The _Goshawk_ drifted, an image of serenity, into the light, and was gone.

_ ** : : : didn't quite think that one through, did we?** _

"Bugger."

Clough ran, his breathing laboured like a milking machine in the desert, his black cloak flapping behind him, his boots pounding a slightly irregular tattoo on the polished floor. The vortex was shrinking, and even its lower edge was a good thirty feet off the deck.

He jumped, knowing he'd never make it.

_ ** : : : boinga-boinga-boinga upsidaisy** _

The floor receded quicker, and further, than he had expected.

_Wow,_ he thought, _I never realised I could jump this high._ The shrinking silver rectangle grew closer, his upwards momentum slowing but still guaranteeing him a direct hit in the centre of the vortex. _I could almost believe I can..._

The vortex closed behind him.

The figures milling about in the hangar wondered where their commander had gone. The gunners outside wondered where their target had gone. And something wondered where its champion had gone.

_ ** : : : hello? where'd you go?** _

_ ** : : : bloody foreigners** _

_ ** : : : bugger this for a lark i'm off home** _

With the painfully bright glare gone, the hangar somehow felt a little on the dark side.


	3. Chapter II: Noe Þe Olde Wimple-eth Fore Me-eth

##  **Chapter II: Noe ޥ Olde Wimple-eth Fore Me-eth**

It was curious. A moment ago, they had been surrounded by a metal craft and seated in comfy seats; now they were in a rocking, rolling, bouncing, juddering wooden cart sitting on a quarter of an inch of blanket. Neither of them could remember exactly where they had been, but they knew it had definitely been more comfortable.

"What do you think's going on?" Harry asked.

Ginny had clearly been thinking much the same. "I don't know," she said slowly, her pensive frown unchanging. "That Death Eater summoned that strange portal thing, and then I was... um... wherever we were last. I can't remember anything about it, though, which is strange. Where are we now?"

Harry glanced out through the window. Verdant forests flashed by, dark glossy leaves glinting in the limpid sunlight as the carriage wheels splashed along the road. It was raining heavily.

"Well, at least we're in England."

Ginny pulled out her mobile phone, and frowned.

"There's no reception. At all."

"That's impossible!" Harry spluttered. "There has to be reception... unless..."

Ginny caught on, her eyes wide.

"Unless we're not _when_ we think." She glanced down at the luxurious calico dress she was wearing, the white blouse welling out over the laced bodice. "Well, shouldn't we be able to tell from our clothes, then?"

"I wouldn't bet on it. Watch any film ever made set between 1000 and 1800, and the serving wenches in the inn will _always_ be wearing that dress. It's like a law, or something."

"What, this style was a pub uniform for seven hundred years?"

"Only in Hollywood."

"Hollywood?"

"Never mind." He looked her over. "That said, it does suit you." He kissed her. "It's a really nice dress."

They kissed again.

"It's a stupid dress," Ginny murmured into his mouth. "All flouncy and stuff. And this thing —" She gestured to a region where Harry's hands were making themselves busy. "— it's like stuffing them in a pillowcase and dropping them off the front of the thing!"

"It has its charms," Harry murmured back. "In fact, we should get you one when we get..." A vague memory drifted on the edge of consciousness, but eluded him. "...home," he finished lamely.

"Fine, but I'm not wearing a bloody wimple."

Harry grinned and pushed her up against the rocking front wall of the carriage, kissing her thoroughly. She giggled.

"Really, Harry?" she asked flirtatiously. "Here?"

"Well, why not?"

As if in answer to his question, a lance burst through the front wall of the carriage, inches above Ginny's head. It dripped crimson onto the floor as hooves thundered past to the left. Harry became instantly serious, suddenly alert.

"To be continued," He said, drawing his wand. "Stay here."

He kicked open the door and looked around. The carriage was bouncing fiercely now, careening off the rocks and bushes that bordered the track. A glance ahead told him what he already knew — the horses were panicked, and the reins were limp.

He grabbed the rail around the top of the carriage and swung himself forward.

His feet landed on the mudguard over the wheel; it flexed under his weight, ground against the iron rim of the wheel, sending a burst of sparks at the left horse.

The carriage lurched as the horse sprang forwards.

Harry lost his grip, dropping heavily onto the footplate. His eyes crossed, briefly, while he desperately flailed for a grip on the doorframe.

"Harry!" Ginny dropped to the floor of the carriage, jammed her feet against the doorframe and grabbed his arm, holding him up.

His shoes scraped the ground, bouncing him off the road and swinging him up in the air, clinging to Ginny for dear life.

He pulled himself forward, slowly edging closer to the front of the carriage.

Inches ahead of him, the front left wheel spun, kicking up mud and gravel.

He reached out with his foot, edging closer, caught the wheel...

...its rotation flung him up, into the air, forwards...

He snagged the luggage rail and used his momentum to swing up and onto the driver's seat. The reins flapped wildly, whipping his face and arms as he reached for them.

He caught them, barely. He pulled.

The horses ignored him, the tug on the reins a mere irritation in their panic.

He lashed out with his foot, kicking the brake at his side; a shower of sparks sprayed from the wheel, but he realised it would not stop the speeding carriage.

Up ahead, the horses were pounding along, frothing, sweating, lather dripping off their sides.

Then he saw them. Thick leather straps held the horses to the shafts, slapping and clanking as they jostled the multifarious bits of tack.

He pointed his wand, aiming carefully.

"_Diffindo_!" he shouted. A blast of light obliterated one of the straps, and the horse on the right peeled off and galloped into the forest.

The coach pulled to the right, bounced off a rock. Harry heard something splinter beneath him. Then he realised that the shaft was sagging, dropping closer to the ground, chipping the paint as it ricocheted off stones and grit.

If he cut the other horse loose, he realised, the shaft would dig into the ground; it would certainly stop the carriage, but he wasn't convinced they'd still be in one piece afterwards.

He leaned round the corner and shouted in through the window.

"Ginny! I can't stop the horses!"

"Cut them loose!"

"I can't!" he bellowed. "We'll go end over end!"

"Without the shaft?"

He blinked. Without the shaft, they wouldn't polevault.

He clambered forwards, leaned over the footplate, saw the shackle connecting the shaft to the carriage.

He stretched down, his arms mere inches from the blurring hooves. The pin holding the shackle was almost within his reach.

Another effort, and he could touch it.

He leaned over, clinging to the footrest, reaching down, grabbed the pin and _pulled_.

The pin came out, and he pulled himself up, tucking the pin into his pocket.

For a moment nothing happened. Then, slowly, the shaft separated from the carriage. It hit the ground with a thunk, a roostertail of mud spraying up behind it.

Harry kicked the brake, stamping down on it with all his weight. The carriage slowed, squealing and sparking, slewed to the left...

...he looked ahead, heard a soft, wet impact as a crossbow bolt felled the fleeing horse, which crashed into the mud, screaming...

...and the carriage hit a bank in the road, teetered, toppled. A wheel shattered, bits of spinning metal and wood arcing outwards.

The coach slid to a stop on its side, coming to rest against a large copper beech. Harry looked around, saw a lone wheel, somehow burning, roll away from the crash and into the bushes.

He dropped down — sideways? — to the ground, and saw the lance. It had gone through the driver, skewering him to the carriage. There was no question about it; the driver wasn't going to be getting up again.

Harry felt oddly detached. He'd known Crafty Robert — K-Bob for short — for years, his mind knew, but somehow, something deeper in his mind knew that he hadn't known him for years twenty minutes ago. Something was wrong.

A thought crossed his mind. _Ginny!_

He started to climb onto the side of the carriage, now facing up, but stopped as a pinprick of cold metal touched his neck.

"Not anuvver inch, squire. Down to the ground, fine sir, easy now."

Harry lowered himself cautiously until his feet touched the ground, then very slowly turned around. There stood a figure dressed in blotchy grey velvet, which seemed to soak up the colours around it and blend into the background. The rain was coming down heavier now, and the bead of water at the point of the dagger only emphasised how sharp it was — and how near Harry's larynx.

"What... do you want?" Harry asked, being carefully not to move his head.

The man sneered.

"Let's just say the Revenuers make house calls, shall we sir?"

As Harry watched, figures clad in black and bedecked with chainmail melted out of the woods, surrounding them. Harry became uncomfortably aware that almost two dozen sharp points, on arrows and spears and halberds and swords, were directly aligned with his stomach. Harry tried to smile ingratiatingly.

"Have I ever mentioned what a great job the Inland Revenue do?"

"Shut it." The man turned and called: "Sir!" He turned back to Harry. "We'll see what the sheriff makes of you."

Harry gulped, then made a mental note not to gulp any more as the point of the dagger made itself gently felt.

A tall, thin figure dressed entirely in black, with lank black hair and a hawk nose stalked round from the other side of the wreck. He had the kind of walk that suggested a theme tune; indeed, as he strode, an ominous, regular, martially pounding melody seemed to drift with him, long mellow minor tones of strings and brass. There was something familiar about him.

"I," he said in the kind of voice that pauses for an attribution after saying nothing but 'I', "am Alan, Sheriff of Nottingham. Doubtless you have back taxes that you forgot to pay in; I am here to ensure that you do not fall behind. It's a service we provide, really." The man had the kind of voice that could without effort pronounce a semicolon. He looked Harry up and down. "You look like a man of means. Interesting and valuable luggage, I presume. We shall..."

He peered closer, glaring intently at Harry's face. His eyes seemed to flicker to his forehead.

"Don't I know you?"

Harry gulped. "No?"

"You're not famous?"

"Only very slightly."

"Well then." The sheriff spun on his heel and started pointing to bags and cases on the ground where they had fallen from the carriage's roof; each was quickly grabbed by a soldier and carried to a small cart that had emerged from the woods nearby. "An extra tax on our little celebrity for trying to be clever."

Harry remained very carefully silent. He struggled slightly as two soldiers bound his hands, but a knife at his throat dissuaded him from overly enthusiastic resistance.

"What are you after?" he demanded, trying to keep his temper in check.

"Nothing much." The sheriff glanced at him nonchalantly through his loupe, temporarily pausing his appraisal of a gold watch he'd found somewhere in the bags. "A little dance, a little love. Sunshine. Moonlight. Good times. Boogie. What we all want." He returned his gaze to the watch and mumbled, almost inaudibly, "and shedloads of money, of course."

He looked up again, tucking the watch into his pocket. He glanced over at the cart and saw it almost full of cases and bags.

"Well, that should do for now. Be sure to save your money, Mr Kodak — we'll be back for it next month."

He mounted his horse, and flourished his hat in a mock salute.

"Well met, Harry of Potter. Until next-"

An arrow whistled through the air and plucked the hat out of his hand, pinning it to a tree some way distant.

"The hobbehods!" one of the soldiers shouted, pointing. The others started for a moment, then bolted for their horses.

"Another time, paparazzi-bait!" cried the sheriff as his charger reared up photogenically.

"Sir?" asked a soldier quietly. "Your theme?"

"Thugger the beam!" the sheriff snarled back. He caught himself. "I mean, bugger the... oh, just go. Leave them!"

And with that, they galloped away.

Harry spun to see what had scared them away. Out of the forest poured several dozen figures, all dressed in muted greens. One, with a bright scarlet feather in his cap, sauntered up to him and, with a broad grin, cut his bonds.

"Scathlock," the man drawled in an accent that a distant part of Harry's brain recognised as American, "Will Scathlock. Any enemy of the Sheriff's is a friend of mine."

"Um, thanks." He looked around at the green-clad figures milling around, keeping watchful arrows nocked in case the Sheriff came back. "Um. Who are you guys?"

Scathlock's grin grew broader.

"We are the Merry Men of Robin Hood!" He caught Harry's look, and added hurriedly: "No, don't worry, we're straight. Just... merry."

"Ah."

"Come with us. We'll take you to see Robin, he'll want to meet you."

Harry looked at the wrecked carriage. He didn't seem to have much choice.

"Yeah, OK." Then a thought struck him — he hadn't heard any sounds from inside the carriage. "Ginny!"

Harry left the Merry Men standing around the carriage and frantically climbed up. He swung the door open and stuck his head into the gloom.

"Ginny? Are you all... Ginny?"

He dropped lightly into the cabin, but it was empty. He hauled himself back up onto the side of the carriage and turned to Will.

"They've got her," he said numbly. "They've taken her with them."

Then something behind the wreck caught his eye. Five men — mostly men, anyway — stood there, trying to hold a number of instruments as nonchalantly as possible. One was sitting on his cello, whistling and trying to project an air of absolute innocence. Another was intently reading a piece of sheet music. Harry goggled at them for a moment before he found his voice.

"And who the hell are you?"

*      *      *

"Harry of Potter, meet Robin of Locksley!" announced Will Scathlock ceremonially. A tall, gangly figure swaggered out of a sort of elaborate treehouse and effortlessly swung to the ground.

"G'day, sport. How the bloody 'ell are ya?"

"Um... I've been better." The corks dangling from Robin's cap were distracting him. "The sheriff took Ginny."

"Ginny's yer sheila?"

"My what?"

"Yer sheila? Yer bird?" He sighed, as if he was trying to speak to a Frenchman on a package holiday. He spoke slowly... and... LOUDLY. "Yer girl?"

_It always works. Or at least, British tourists think it does._

"I suppose so."

"Well, pull up a bloody seat an' have dinner with us, and we'll go up to the bloody castle an' get 'er back for afters, how about that?"

"Um..."

"Great. Come on, meet the bloody gang?"

He guided the bewildered Harry over to where several dozen green-clad figured — both men and women, Harry realised — sat around a large campfire. He pointed out a fat figure in a brown habit, eating chips out of a newspaper.

"That's Friar Tuck? He runs the chip shop along with our other man of the bloody cloth, the chip monk over there?" He pointed to a grey-robed figure almost hidden behind a bank of serving counters.

"Big Steve, our resident bloody strongman?" He pointed to a man who couldn't have been more than four foot tall, though it was entirely possible that his bushy blond beard was considerably longer. The man produced something between a snarl and a laugh — what Harry had to assume was his idea of a friendly 'howareyou' — and raised the mug in his left hand. His right kept a firm hold on a six-foot quarterstaff with a vicious-looking axe head at the end. "He's very fond of his bloody scumble?"

"Scumble?"

"The local brew? It's made from apples?" He seemed to catch himself. "Well, mostly bloody apples?"

"Why do you talk like that? Turning everything into a question?"

"I don't?"

"Yes you do."

"Well, if you must know..." He lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. "I'm not English?"

"I dunno, are you?"

"I'm saying, I'm not?"

"How the hell should I know?"

They reached a sort of stalemate of confused punctuation wherein they both looked away from each other for a second, trying to piece together the disjointed conversation. By unspoken consent, they shrugged and moved on.

They walked around to the far side of the fire. A cluster of slick-looking figures with broad lapels on their jerkins stood, chatting intently. They all wore dark glasses.

"What about them?"

"Oh, that's John Fred? And his bloody playboys? They're no bloody use? First sign of a wimple an' they'll bugger off?"

A small shed stood off to one side, a heavy brass padlock dangling on its door. The lock might have been an impressive security precaution, had the walls not been made of leaves woven into a loose hazel lattice.

"What's in there?" Harry asked curiously.

"Aaaah, I was bloody hoping you'd ask that!" Robin strode up to it, unhooked the padlock —

"Why don't you lock the padlock?"

"Look at the walls, mate? There'd be no bloody point, would there?"

There was, Harry was forced to admit, a certain logic to that, so he let it go.

Robin swung the door open. In the darkness within, dozens of gold items glistened in the firelight.

"Wow."

"They're me bloody trophies? I just got this one —" he pointed "— at a competition last week? I was down in Tumba-bloody-Rumba shootin' kanga-bloody-roos?"

"Kangaroos in England?"

"No, Tumba-bloody-Rumba? Try to keep up?"

The evening progressed in much the same vein, with Harry getting more and more confused. Harry spent much of his meal entertaining the Merry Men with tales of his travails against Voldemort. Eventually dinner was over, and the assemblage dissipated in various directions and for, Harry assumed, various reasons.

Harry sat on a log, staring into space, still not sure if it was wise following Robin Hood into battle. But that particular problem eventually solved itself.

"Harry," Will said, strolling up and sitting next to him. "You've had your fair share of combat experience, right?"

"A bit."

"Well, you're in luck."

"Why?"

"You've been promoted."

"What?"

"Well, y'see, Robin..." Will seemed slightly embarrassed. "Friar Tuck tried a new experiment tonight, and it had a few fairly nasty side effects on Robin, so he needs to sit out the attack on the castle. So congratulations, you're in charge."

"_WHAT?_"

"Never heard of field promotions?"

"I haven't heard of being promoted before joining up, no."

"Well, the practice has to start somewhere."

"But..."

"Come on, we'll get you kitted out."

"But..."

"And a word to the wise... don't try Tucky's deep-fried Mars Bars."

*      *      *

And so it was that Harry Potter found himself on a horse at the head of a column of seven score green-clad lunatics, going up against a _whole bloody castle_ of professional troops. It was likely, he considered, that he had lost his sanity somewhere, but a moment's thought indicated that if he was to get it back, he'd most likely find it in much the same place as he found Ginny, so it all worked out in the end.

He'd had quite a lot of scumble over dinner, but it didn't seem to be harming his thinking.

There was a storm brewing, Harry was sure of it. The rain that afternoon had been a harbinger of wetter things to come, and the thick dark clouds above had already turned the road into an unpleasant slush for the column to ride through. They'd been riding for maybe an hour when the castle loomed out of the mist. Its drawbridge was up.

"Um, Will?"

"Yes?" Will rode next to Harry, and certainly seemed rather more comfortable in the saddle than Harry.

"Do we have a plan for, y'know, getting in?"

"A plan?"

"Yeah. You know, a scheme. A plot. A vague idea of how the hell we're going to get in."

"Oh, we never bother with those. It all works out in the end."

_Oh god,_ Harry thought, _we really are in a film._

*      *      *

Ginny looked out of her window. She hadn't been badly treated, though she had a few bruises from being slung over a soldier's saddle on the way back. She'd just been locked up in the gatehouse, in a fairly comfortable room overlooking the road to Sherwood. The sheriff had come up to gloat a few times, but otherwise she'd been left alone.

She still had her wand, though. She'd been briefly frisked for weapons, but before being captured she'd had the foresight to tuck the wand in her hair as a hairpin. It had barely warranted mention by the soldiers.

Thus she had rather significantly augmented the comfort level of the furniture in her room, and magically resized her garderobe so she had more or less the same facilities as she had at home — wherever that was, she couldn't quite remember.

Now she'd been standing at her window, gazing winsomely out across the meadow. After all, there wasn't much else for her to do.

In the distance, something was approaching. She squinted. As they drew closer, she realised it was a column of people on horseback, waving swords and spears and bows in what they doubtless perceived as a fairly threatening way.

But they didn't look like the Sheriff's men.

As they drew closer, she recognised the green garb she'd caught a glimpse of as she'd been carried away. Closer... and there was something familiar about the man at their head.

Closer yet, and she recognised Harry.

Then she looked down, and saw that the road they were charging along with no apparent intent to stop ended abruptly in a boggy, stagnant moat. _Men,_ she thought, _why can they never think things through?_

She walked to the door and leaned down by the keyhole.

"Unlock the door," she crooned sweetly to the guards she knew had to be outside. She was rewarded by a roar of laughter.

"You _really_ want to unlock the door," she continued. The laughter stepped up a notch.

"Fine," she muttered. "I'm coming out now whether you unlock or not, and when I do you'll wish you'd ingratiated yourselves by unlocking the door." There was a crash outside that might well have been an armour-clad soldier collapsing in giggles.

"Fine then."

She pointed her wand at the door. "_Aloho_... No. _Reducto Praejudi Extremis_."

The door, that had been there for an awful lot of years, and had been made of very expensive and very hard oak, was no more. Instead it — and much of the granite doorframe — was blasted into charred and sizzling shards, pinging and ricocheting through the corridor outside.

Ginny stepped outside and dispatched the four guards with stunners, though one required a foot to the groin before he was helpful enough to stand still to be hit. Then she glanced around, took a guess at where the controls for the drawbridge were, and stalked off.

*      *      *

"CHAAAAAAARGE!" Will screamed, spurring his horse onwards towards the castle.

The distance to a squelchy, mostly-watery grave was closing far quicker than Harry would have liked, but he nevertheless kept pace. Then, just when all seemed lost, the heavy drawbridge started to move.

This chronicler does not know whether you, dear reader, have ever seen a solid oak drawbridge open when the ratchet is released. It starts out slowly, and accelerates until it crashes down with a fairly significant thump.

In this case, it caught a — very briefly — startled halberdier under one corner.

Will turned to Harry.

"See?" he shouted over the rolling thunder of the charge. "Never fails!"

The speeding column stampeded over the drawbridge, under the mysteriously open portcullis (though an eagle-eyed Merry Swordswoman at the back of the column noted with some surprise a few chunks of what appeared to be partially melted portcullis lying around) and into the courtyard.

The startled soldiers in the courtyard spun, frozen for a moment by the sudden charge into their midst. Then they turned and ran for their weapons.

The battle was short.

Two hundred unarmed, sleepy and recently fed soldiers were no match for almost a hundred and forty well armed, slightly drunk lunatics in green catching them by surprise. Those that weren't massacred by the initial charge retreated to the Prince's private suite, which they barricaded and prepared to defend.

Knowing there was no food and no exit within, Harry simply ordered a number of strong guards posted outside, and left to find Ginny.

He found her on the staircase leading up into the gatehouse. Her dress was badly damaged, and she had a few nasty scrapes, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. Not so, however, the dozen or so soldiers sprawled in various degrees of significant inconvenience at the bottom of the stairs. Several seemed to have rather more joints than they had started the day with.

"What took you so long?" she smirked.

Harry took the steps two at a time and caught her in an embrace. Thoroughly entwined, she guided him up the stairs and into what had been her quarters for most of the day. A quick reparo on the door, and they were back together.

Ginny's hands started migrating south. Possibly in search of warmer climate.

Harry reached down, not wishing to be outdone, and found his move heralded by a sharp clang and, from within Ginny's robes, a nasal voice shouting "GERROFF!"

Harry recoiled, blinked twice.

"Um, Ginny..." he said slowly. "Um. I don't know if you know this, but your... your... um. They're talking."

Ginny flushed, embarrassed.

"Well, yes." She opened her gown and let it drop.

There, encircling her, were two bands of gleaming metal; one high, one low. They were joined by a length of chain, from which dangled a heavy-looking padlock. Two rivets and the horizontal keyhole gave it the look of a face — and, with the leer it wore, an altogether too smug expression.

It blew a raspberry at Harry.

"It's a chastity bra," Ginny explained. "My mother had it fitted the moment I grew out of my old pyjamas."

"Wait a minute," Harry mused. "That can't be right, we're in the wrong fic for that!"

"Either way," the padlock interjected, "That's the deal. No ring, no ding-ding."

"Oh good," Ginny observed drily, "a comedian."

"Well, how do we unlock it?"

"Um... I don't think Mum ever covered that."

"Why not?" Harry was starting to panic.

"I don't think she'd expected it to become an issue."

Harry shook his head in disbelief.

"Not an..." A thought struck him. "Have you seen the inside of her wrist recently?"

"Why?"

"Just a thought."

"Hang on..." Ginny posited thoughtfully. "The traditional reasoning is that somewhere, someone who is destined to be my one true love has a key that will fit the lock."

Harry gawked at her for a moment.

Then he burst out laughing.

Several minutes later, he picked himself up off the floor, tears of mirth streaming.

"Destiny? 'Someone, somewhere'? Any old drunk turns up at the door with a shiny key, and you're stuck with him? They don't think things through when they write legends, do they?"

"Well, no." Ginny helped him back up onto the eiderdown. "But I have a better idea."

*      *      *

And so, outside the castle, echoing far and wide, went up the cry:

"_CALL A LOCKSMITH!_"

*      *      *

And there a lesser chronicler might leave the story, in order that our heroes might continue their explorations unobserved. However, one vital event ensured that this was not to be.

You see, dear reader, one of the problems with magically enlarging a garderobe to the size of a fairly comfortable muggle bathroom is that any people local to the period who happen to be searching a castle for hidden foes are perhaps likely to ignore it as a potential hiding place.

And so, indeed, it was that Harry and Ginny were captured by three soldiers who, in their minds, were now very likely in line for a promotion. A circuitous route, with long and careful pauses at each corner to avoid the sparse patrols, brought them to a nondescript door hidden behind a tapestry. They knocked.

Within, they found themselves face to face with Clough. He wore a crown. He smiled indolently at them.

"Well well, what have we here?"

"_You're_ the Prince?" Harry spluttered. "I might have known."

One of the soldiers, a raw recruit by the name of Scruffins, cuffed him over the head, and pushed Ginny forward.

"We found a witch, Prince Clough! May we burn 'er?"

"A witch!" the second guard, Moth, added excitedly. The third one, subscribing to the philosophy of always being prepared, scurried up carrying a duck. The Prince waved them away.

"No, wait outside. I have something special planned for these two."

The guards retired to outside the tapestry. There they stood, smoking surreptitiously, waiting to serve their master.

They had stood there for maybe five minutes, when there was a great splintering CRASH from the Prince's chambers.

"What was that?" the duck man asked.

"Dunno," said Moth.

Then the Prince, clutching the irritating female captive, came running out of the room, knocking Scruffins flying. He started to pick himself up just in time to be trampled by that other prisoner, the one with the black hair, as he gave chase.

He painfully dragged himself to a sitting position with his back to the doorway. The other two stood facing him.

"That was close," he muttered. He glanced at his mates.

They were cringing, crouching wide-eyed by the wall, staring past his left ear.

"What are you staring at?"

None of the three had much chance to say any more, for behind Scruffins stood a very short, very bearded, very strong man with a very big axe. It had much of the door stuck on it.

"Here's Stevie!" the beast rumbled.

*      *      *

Clough's flight had taken them out of the keep and up onto the battlements. Out here, the storm was raging at full strength; great sheets of rain and sleet swept the flagstones, gusts of wind snapped and flapped the flags flying above the castle, and jagged flares of lightning flashed through the twilight.

Clough climbed higher, to the top of the tower at the west corner of the gatehouse. He backed up to the crenellations, pointing his wand at Harry.

Harry, eyes scrunched up against the driving rain, slowly made his way up from the curtain wall and onto the far side of the gatehouse. As he approached Clough, he noticed to his horror how half a dozen swordsmen — Clough's swordsmen — detached themselves from the shadows and encircled him. _They must have been lurking up here since the battle,_ he realised.

Harry edged closer, no more than two arm's lengths away from Clough. Ginny's hands were tied, she was gagged, and fear was apparent in her eyes.

"Don't come a single step closer!" Clough shouted, aiming his wand directly at Harry's forehead. Ginny shot a pleading glance at him.

"Harry..." she tried to say, her voice muffled by the gag.

"You'll never take me alive!" Clough screamed over the storm, holding Ginny with an arm around her throat.

"Don't be a fool, Clough!" Harry was getting nervous now — he didn't like the idea of Ginny that close to the edge. After all, the moat was a long way down. "Let her go!"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Clough clambered onto the crenellations and waved his wand down the side of the wall. "_Recro foris_!"

The gleaming silver vortex appeared once more, this time below him, a few feet above the swampy waters of the moat. It clearly didn't like being cast from such a high angle, or perhaps it was storms it objected to; either way, it revolved slowly around its axis.

After that, many things happened at once.

Clough stepped up, his foot gaining purchase on the merlon, Ginny pulled behind him.

Harry lunged, closing the gap between them, leaping into an embrasure and grabbing Ginny...

...and Clough jumped.

He lost his grip on Ginny and plummeted down towards the swirling light.

Harry and Ginny teetered on the edge of the rain-slick wall, Harry's clumsy period footwear slipping on the wet stone. But their precarious position left only one outcome, precipitated by a frantic lunge by one of the swordsmen.

They fell.

Clough hit the vortex a few yards before them, as it passed the horizontal. A moment later, just before it became a vertical rectangle too thin to hit, Harry and Ginny, clutched in each others arms, fell through.

The swordsman, who had lunged too far and passed through the embrasure a fraction of a second after Harry, missed the vortex and met a brief but damp end in the near-solid moat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notice any anachronisms? Anything out of character? Before you say "Ginny doesn't have a mobile phone" and so on, do remember what genre I'm ripping off in this chapter. It's not one where Hollywood is renowned for historical accuracy, especially if Messrs Costner or Gibson are involved... ;-)
> 
> Anyway, thus ends the chapter that wouldn't die. I started it, blocked it out, wrote it... and it just kept going. And going. And going. But now it's finished, and posted, and I never need to write any more on it ever again. Until I get another bloody plot bunny.
> 
> Although I have a sneaking suspicion that Chapter 4 will go on in much the same way...


	4. Interlude: Back To Reality?

##  **Interlude: Back To Reality?**

The vortex opened, disgorging them flat on their faces. Harry looked up at the sound of a scream to see Clough, still flying, the momentum from his fall and the angle of his entry propelling him a fair distance. He landed with a crash of breaking branches in a wooded area some way away.

Harry glanced at Ginny, beside him. She was lying, bruised and groaning, on the front lawn of... Hogwarts?

It was there, behind them. The castle was unmistakeable. But something felt wrong.

Apart from anything else, the ground was covered with a thick layer of snow.

He looked around. The gates were wide open, and down by the lake... Dumbledore's tomb was gone.

"Curiouser and curiouser," he muttered. "Come on."

They hurried in through the gates, trying to avoid being seen. This was easier than they had expected; the halls were deserted.

"Where is everyone?"

Then they heard laughter and music from the Great Hall. The door was ajar, and within...

...they saw hundreds of students in elegant robes.

No, not robes — gowns. They were open at the front, showing elegant but in many cases distinctly muggle clothes beneath. A few of the older students even wore muggle dinner jackets, with their robes draped casually over one shoulder.

"This doesn't make sense. This is two years ago," Harry said, astonished. Then he saw Hermione. He recognised the scene — he had seen her arrival himself the first time around. But this was all wrong. "That has to be Hermione... but those robes..."

"Wrong colour," Ginny agreed. "She'd never wear those." A look of immense disappointment crossed her face. "Still not home."

Harry sighed deeply. "Another jump, then."

Ginny nodded, slightly dejected.

"Still, maybe this is close enough to get home," Ginny mused, fiddling with her wand. She pointed it at the wall, thinking as hard as she could about the Burrow. "_Recro Foris_," she whispered.

The silvery screen popped into existence in the alcove she had pointed it at, shrinking to fit the narrow space.

"Well, here goes nothing," Harry said, preparing for his runup.

Then, out of nowhere, the screaming figure of Clough appeared at the doors, barrelled past him, tackled Ginny and dove into the vortex.

Harry blinked, then swore under his breath and followed them in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Curiously, this took longer to write than any of the previous chapters. I haven't really paid a great deal of attention to the HP films, and so was rather at a loss to find nice, concrete things they could see to show them they weren't really at Hogwarts.


	5. Level 3: The Catacombs of Kekarce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had great fun writing this one - and I managed to fit in most of the silly ideas I had. There's a brief spot of author insertion, in the most literal sense, but hopefully in a way that won't cause nausea. Rest assured that it's very brief, though.

##  **Level 3: The Catacombs Of Kekarce**

** L O A D I N G . . . **

*      *      *

Ginny landed heavily and rolled, springing back on her feet as Clough landed flat on his face beside her. He rolled, slowly and painfully, onto his back, blinking against the flare as the vortex closed. His eyes slowly focussed, then grew wide as they settled on Ginny.

"Oh... bollocks..."

Ginny glanced down, looked questioningly at Clough, then did a double-take and glanced down again.

Her... how shall I put this... Well, she could no longer see her feet. Her view downwards was, shall we say, pectorally obscured. A quick rummage around beyond visual range, and she found that her clothing had once again changed, her wench dress replaced by... she wasn't too sure. Some ugly turquoise thing, anyway, and brown shorts that ended almost before her legs had a chance to start, and a bit further down... what the hell were those...

Her fingers met cold steel and polished leather, which she somehow knew was laminated over form-pressed thermo-plastic... A smirk crossed her face.

Clough skittered backwards, scrabbling across the eroded granite.

Her thumb, through some muscle memory she didn't know she had, rocked the shroud forward, and she drew a heavy, stainless steel Kimber TLII — _how in buggery did I know that?_ she asked herself — released the safety catch and loosed a heavy, copper-jacketed .45 round — _what the..._ \- into a pool behind Clough. He spun and ran towards a tunnel hewn into the rock at the other end of the cavern.

Ginny's smirk widened.

"Ready or not, tosser. Here I come."

Guns akimbo, with a predatory grin across her face, Ginny loped off after him.

*      *      *

Harry had no idea how he had ended up in this situation. Indeed, he was not entirely certain that he _had_, strictly, got into it — just one moment he was in oblivion, and the next he was here.

"_Here_", as a place, was not intrinsically bad. Indeed, in terms of pure ergonomics, he was fairly comfortable. He had a comfortable seat, a well padded backrest, and perfectly placed footrests. No, the problem was what the rest of the world was doing.

At the moment, it was whizzing past him at exceedingly high speeds. Like his seat, this was not in itself a bad thing; on a broom, not that he remembered brooms, he would have thoroughly enjoyed himself.

In this rusting, careening mine cart, it was less pleasant.

He paused his screaming momentarily, long enough to take a breath; then he resumed.

The endless downhill seemed to be levelling out, and he got the impression that the cart slowed slightly. Perhaps, he thought, it would stop.

His next thought, as he saw the solid wall of rock before him, was a fervent wish that he wouldn't stop _quite_ that quickly. Thinking fast, he spotted a set of ancient, decaying points ahead; in their current setting, the tracks would take him straight into the wall.

He grabbed a rock from the cart, hefted it in his hand, and flung it at the lever. It missed.

With mere seconds to spare, he hurled a second rock; this time, it hit its mark.

The points ground into their second position, and Harry...

...came to the corner.

"Oh sh..." he began, clamping his battered brown fedora down on his head, before the breath was pushed out of him by the centripetal force as his cart threw itself round the corner.

Round the corner waited yet another unpleasant surprise: the incline suddenly increased again, and the cart picked up speed, its rusty wheels whirring and clattering on the shaky rails.

Harry frantically kicked the footbrake. It seemed to work, for a second...

...then, with a shower of golden sparks, the brake pad fell off. It ricocheted off the tunnel wall, narrowly missing his head, and pinged off into the darkness. Harry gawked at it for a moment, then stared dumbly straight ahead.

He blinked.

Then he stared again. Depressingly, the world had failed to adjust itself to a more accommodating configuration.

And the track still ceased at the top of the cliff edge that was rapidly approaching.

Harry gripped his seat with both hands, knuckles whitening, screwing his eyes shut.

"I'm gonna die, oh god, oh god, I'm gonna die, I'm toast, I'm gonna die," he chanted to himself through clenched teeth.

Something about the timbre of the clicking wheels changed, became oddly hollow, then...

...there was silence.

Every sound had stopped, except an ominous windy hiss, like cycling on a windy day.

He opened his eyes.

The cliff, with its tracks, was far behind him. He chanced a glance downwards.

Far below him — indeed, his inevitably imminent destination — lay an enormous underground lake.

He screamed then, and continued to do so until he hit the water several seconds later.

Thus it was a wet, bedraggled, and severely bruised Dr Potter who dragged himself from the lake twenty minutes later.

He staggered up the rocky beach and sank down on a smooth boulder. He planted the now battered and wet fedora on his head and fished in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He wasn't sure why — he couldn't remember ever smoking the things — but it seemed the right thing to do.

He flicked open the packet and tipped one of the sorry-looking cylinders into his hand. It was soaked.

"Should have bloody known," he muttered to himself, flinging the useless pack into the lake. He leaned his chin in his hand and pondered his situation. There was a lake in front of him, though no chance whatsoever of getting out the way he had come in. The lake seemed to exit through a low tunnel to his left, but he had had enough of water for one day. The only other exit, then, was the cobwebbed, tattered, but clearly man-made passage behind him. It also had the advantage of leading up, which seemed to Harry to be an excellent idea.

And so, standing painfully and double-checking the revolver on his belt, Harry set off towards the temple.

> _(Wait a minute. Temple? You never said anything about a temple. /Harry)_
> 
> _(I'm sure I did, you know. /Torak)_
> 
> _(You bloody didn't. You said "a passage leading upwards". That's what I signed on for. Not a bloody temple. Temples are full of traps and things. I've already been half killed today, I don't want to finish the job. /Harry)_
> 
> _(Just get on with it, or I'll write in a great white shark, too. /Torak)_
> 
> _(Fine. Bastard. /Harry)_

Harry carefully made his way up the passage, cautiously sneaking round piles of rubble and sweeping cobwebs out of the way with his machete. Almost half an hour later, as he rounded a corner, he stumbled over something. He lowered the flaming torch in his hand...

> _(Where did I get the torch, then? /Harry)_
> 
> _(It's Hollywood. Shut up. /Torak)_

...and found that what he had tripped on was a human skull.

He edged forward, and soon found its associated body. It lay several yards forward, and had clearly been decapitated with some force. Harry stepped slowly forward, approaching the skeleton, and noticed a disturbance in the air ahead of him.

Whatever it was swept through the air, slicing effortlessly through the ancient cobwebs. Harry barely had time to register it, before his head joined the skull on the floor.

Meanwhile, in a vast cavern almost a mile away, Ginny —

> _(Whoa, wait, hang on just a bloody second. /Harry)_
> 
> _(Now what? /Torak)_
> 
> _(YOU KILLED ME! /Harry)_
> 
> _(What's your point? The first person down that corridor always dies. That's how the audience knows it's dangerous, so they'll be more impressed when the hero manages to... Oh. /Torak)_
> 
> _(You... you... /Harry)_
> 
> _(Whoops. /Torak)_
> 
> _(You utter **arse**. /Harry)_
> 
> _(Oh, fine. Whining little bugger, moaning about a little scratch. /Torak)_
> 
> _(MY HEAD CAME OFF!!! /Harry)_
> 
> _(Fine then, if you're going to be like that about it. Back a bit. /Torak)_
> 
> _(Thank you. Now stay the hell out of my story, OK? /Harry)_
> 
> _(Hmph. /Torak)_

He edged forward, and soon found its associated body. It lay several yards forward, and had clearly been decapitated with some force. Harry stepped slowly forward, approaching the skeleton, and noticed a disturbance in the air ahead of him.

Whatever it was swept through the air, slicing effortlessly through the ancient cobwebs. Thinking quickly, like the smart-arse little adventurer that he is —

> _(Oi! /Harry)_
> 
> _(Oh. Sorry. /Torak)_

— as can be expected from a highly-skilled and inhumanly qualified adventurer-archaeologist, he dropped to the ground and heard the razor-sharp blade swoop harmlessly overhead. A quick examination revealed a recessed track in the wall, hidden behind centuries of dust and cobwebs. Now that he knew what to look for, he continued on his hands and knees, crawling to the end of the corridor until he saw that the track had ceased.

He stood, dusting himself off, and continued carefully onwards to the temple.

The temple of DOOOOM! BWAHAHAHAAAA!

> _(What did we say? /Harry)_
> 
> (Sorry. Won't happen again. /Torak)

...and continued carefully on towards the temple.

*      *      *

Ginny jumped from the altar, bounded off a ledge, leapt to another, and wedged herself into a corner, clinging to a small crack in the stonework. Her keen eyes scanned the ground below her, easily picking out the hungry creatures prowling below. With her free hand she drew one of her pistols and casually embedded a hollowpoint bullet in the skull of one of the slavering beasts.

A few more shots, and they lay dead, bleeding out on the coarse stone floor. Ginny leaped from her perch with a somersault, landing lightly into a crouch. She glanced around — the coast was clear.

She reached for the altar and grabbed the brass key lying on it; then, swearing under her breath at the lead Clough had gained, she jogged off down a corridor.

The corridor eventually ended in a heavy mahogany door; a twist of the brass key opened it to reveal a broad spiral staircase, winding upwards. The downwards stairs had crumbled long ago, and the shaft descended into thick darkness. Far above, a speck of light suggested that somewhere, the surface still existed — not that the staircase led that far. She took the stairs two at a time, climbing up to the next level at a brisk clip.

The stairs ended at the entrance to a wide limestone hallway; the staircase had once continued, but the slabs it had consisted of lay, shattered, somewhere in the depths of the shaft. Left with little choice, she set off cautiously down the hall.

She approached a large doorway; beyond, limpid green light drifted from above, a light mist seeping in from somewhere. She stepped through...

...before her lay a vast cavern, a quarter of a mile across, bisected by a wide chasm. A matching fissure stretched across the great domed ceiling, a hundred feet up, through which a constant cascade of thin mist poured in from the jungle floor above, tinted an ethereal green by the light filtering through the foliage. On the other side, barely visible through the haze, lay what she knew had to be her goal; the colossal limestone fa硤e of the great temple of Molteplexl, where the god of light and shadow had once been worshipped by the now long-gone civilisation that had dwelt here...

...and with a great SLAM, a solid slab of rock dropped through a slot in the ceiling, fracturing flagstones and effectively blocking her return. There was no turning back now.

She gingerly stepped forward, making her way down the grand staircase to the enormous concourse. The elaborate edifices carved into the rock all around it suggested it had once been some kind of forum or marketplace; now they stood empty and corroded. Where crowds of people had once gone about their business, now vines and moss were everywhere, as nature crept in through the crack in the ceiling to reclaim its territory.

Nothing assailed her as she made her way to the chasm, though she thought she caught fleeting glimpses of movement and the glint of eyes in some of the prehistoric shops. None of the flagstones dropped from under her, no blades rushed through the air. Nothing broke the sepulchral silence bar her footsteps, and the quiet chittering of small animals hiding in the shadows.

Eventually she reached the centre of the cavern, or at least the near edge of the chasm. There, crossing from one edge of the gorge to the other, stood a row of pillars, perfectly circular and fashioned so that even now, the joins between stones could barely be seen. Their bases were shrouded in the shadows of the abyss, but their purpose was clear; stepping stones to pass from one side to the other.

Ginny sized up the path. The gaps were wide, but easily within her capacity to jump. And so, with a short runup, she leapt to the first pillar.

It swayed, slightly, as she landed; at perhaps four or five feet across, the column was far taller than it was wide, so this came as no surprise to her. Compensating instinctively for the sway, she planted her feet firmly on the surface, which still bore faint marks of long-eroded gripping textures.

She lined up her next jump, retired to the edge of the column to afford some degree of acceleration, and leapt once more; again, the leap offered little trouble. She continued the same way until she was only two platforms from the far side. Three more leaps, and she would be across. She retired, ran, leapt for the penultimate column.

But this pillar stood directly below the edge of the great schism in the ceiling, whence had dripped water onto it for hundreds of years; over the centuries it had developed a thick, healthy coating of wet, slippery lichen. Ginny's foot slipped, and she staggered momentarily on the edge, trying to regain her balance, before a monumental _CRASH_ echoed from somewhere in the cave...

...and she tumbled off, into the rift.

She fell for several seconds into the darkness, and then, just when she thought she would keep falling for ever —

— the jagged, rocky base of the chasm appeared, growing closer by the second.

And so, with a muffled but curiously sensual "oof" and a wet, conclusive thud, Ginny Weasley died.

*      *      *

Harry's journey had been uneventful. He had found no more traps after the decapitation hall, and was finally making good time, jogging through the anonymous corridors and briskly but cautiously climbing any stairs he found that wended their way upwards.

He finally reached a long corridor, at the end of which a pale green light drifted in. He set off, at a jog. But before he had taken a dozen paces...

_click_

In the silent hall, the quiet sound shot through him like the crack of a rifle. That sound could only mean bad news. Then... a low, penetrating rumble reached his ears. He looked around, trying to establish where it was coming from, but without success.

The noise was getting louder, and was now clearly coming from somewhere behind him. He looked back.

Then, swinging into the corridor from a curved side passage, a vast spherical boulder rolled into sight.

Harry's eyes widened, and he froze for a fraction of a second.

"Bollocks..."

Then he ran.

He ran for the light, ducking storms of poison darts, hurdling fallen masonry, his feet pounding the stone floor as he sprinted for the exit.

It was close, perhaps only a dozen yards away. But the boulder was gaining on him fast.

He stumbled on something — a femur, though he had no time to notice — and fell to the ground just as two racks of razor-sharp spikes swung across the corridor mere inches above him and withdrew. Oblivious, he scrambled to his feet and resumed his run.

The exit was only feet away, but the rolling ball of death behind him had not been slowed by any of the corridor's traps, and at one point one of his swinging arms swung back and touched it, leaving a nasty scrape.

He sped up, reached the exit, and dove out to the side, letting the boulder pass.

It shot out of the exit, sweeping a cloud of dust behind it. The heavy, coarse stone dust dissipated quickly, leaving Harry able to see the vast cavern he was in. A chasm ran through it, and halfway across it, on a pillar, stood...

"Ginny?"

He goggled in amazement as she leapt to the next pillar, then hauled himself to his feet and started running towards her. On the other side of the cave, the boulder that had chased him finally came to a stop, crashing loudly into one of the old shops.

Ginny stumbled, and fell.

"Ginny!" Harry screamed, and ran; but when he reached the precipice she was nowhere to be seen.

He sank back onto the edge, staring into the blackness in forlorn disbelief.

"Ginny..."

He was shaken out of his reverie by a sound; looking up, he saw Clough staring at him from under the obsidian marquee of the temple in the distance, then spin on his heel and slip inside.

A rage overtook him, and he glanced around for some way — any way — to get across. And he found it.

Sprinting to the edge of the chamber, he clambered up onto the crumbling storefront nearest the chasm. He tore a vine loose from the wall, tested its strength, and swung out over the pit.

The liana took him almost halfway across, but there the arc ended. Unthinking, he jumped at the apex of the swing, barely snagging another hanging vine and continuing his pursuit.

A third creeper, and his feet hit the limestone floor on the other side. He rolled to absorb the impact, and followed Clough into the labyrinthine innards of the temple of Molteplexl.

*      *      *

She blinked. The world faded into view before her, and she found herself once again standing, feet squarely on the ground, shoulder blades to the solid stone door, at the entrance to the vast cavern, looking out over the chasm. A track of crumbled flagstones ran across the floor, ending in a demolished shop where enormous jars of ancient maize spilled around a massive round boulder.

_That must have been the crash,_ she realised, though she saw no signs of anyone else in the great chamber.

On a sudden thought she glanced down. She appeared to be intact, and rather less two-dimensional than she'd expected after a fall like that. _Curiouser and curiouser,_ she thought, before jogging down to the great crack in the floor. She approached the chasm more cautiously this time, and looked down into the abyss. She perused the row of pillars, then turned her attention to the rest of it. And there, in the dim light at the edge of the cave, something caught her eye.

Something was wrong with the rock walls of the rift. They seemed to shift as she moved her head; she experimentally shuffled sideways several feet, and true enough — a bar across the yawning gap moved differently from the rock around it.

She walked over there, testing her footing at each step, until she stood directly above the anomaly. Looking down, she saw nothing out of the ordinary; the vast pit remained, the inky darkness unbroken.

She drew a small sandbag from her backpack and threw it straight out. It curved up, then fell into the abyss... and stopped.

It seemed to hang in mid-air, halfway across. Cautiously, she lay on the edge and reached down — sure enough, a rough stone surface met her fingertips. There was a bridge across, cunningly camouflaged to be invisible in the eternal twilight of the cavern.

She sat on the edge and gingerly moved her weight onto her feet. One foot in front of the other, feeling her way with her toes and forcing herself not to look down, she edged her way across.

Several nerve-wracking minutes later, her feet finally touched solid ground once more. She fell to her hands and knees, panting and quivering from the exertion. Then, when she had pulled herself together, she rose.

The temple beckoned to her. Somehow, she knew that her goal lay within. She set off.

Barely had she set off, however, before a birdlike screech shattered the silence. She halted, scanning left and right for the source of the sound. Then came another, slightly different in pitch.

Suddenly, three reptilian creatures, bounding on their hind legs, burst from the shadows and ran towards her, beady eyes burning, teeth glittering.

Ginny's eyes widened. In one fluid motion she drew her pistols and pumped round after round into the monsters.

One dropped, its small brain liquefied. Dodging its mates, she dived behind it, using its corpse for cover as she shot a second. She spun, drawing a bead on the third...

...and her gun clicked. Both slides were locked back, the magazines empty. And the creature, sharp foreclaws flailing, was approaching fast.

She thrust the guns back in their holsters, letting the slides ride forward onto empty chambers a fraction of a second before she rocked the shroud back over them.

But this left her with no time to dodge the final beast's attack, so she did the only thing she could. She drew the long, Teflon-coated combat knife bolted to the shroud of one of her holsters.

The beast lunged.

She dropped, supine, to the floor, and the beast's charge carried it over her.

She thrust the knife up into its neck, and the creature's momentum carried it forwards on the blade, slitting it from skull to sternum.

She rolled to the side, avoiding the torrent of blood, and drew her guns again, instinctively slapping new magazines into them and racking their slides. She held them aimed on the beast's head, just in case...

It screeched, a high, keening cry, trying to get up.

She shot it, and it screeched no more.

She tucked the guns back into her holsters and permitted herself a grin. This place had thrown everything it could at her, and...

An answering bellow came from within the bedrock.

A bricked-up shopfront burst open, and a vast reptilian monster emerged. Its head alone was longer than Ginny was tall, its vestigial forelegs carried razor-sharp claws, and it crunched lazily out onto the concourse on its massive rear legs.

It yawned at her, a dull hungry rumble emanating from the depths of its gullet. Then, with a roar, it started loping straight for her.

She stood, stunned, for a moment. She thought about her pistols, and the trouble they'd had killing the smaller creatures.

"Bugger this for a game of soldiers," she muttered, and ran.

She darted for the entrance to the temple, aiming for the cover of the vast obsidian marquee.

The monster gave chase, its earth-shaking footsteps echoing in the cavern.

The marquee drew closer, and Ginny's keen eyesight picked up a crack along its top, where it joined the temple frontage. She reached into her backpack with one hand and withdrew a small, heavy metal object. She yanked the pin out and continued running, clutching the spoon tightly.

By now she imagined she could almost feel the behemoth's breath on the back of her neck, and with a final sprint she reached the marquee. A deft flick of the wrist, and the grenade sailed up and onto the glossy protrusion.

She ran, dived, rolled into the foyer of the temple, spun to look outside.

The monster had just reached the edge of the marquee, crouched to reach inside, sticking its head in as if to follow her...

...and the grenade went off.

The gleaming black slab, twelve tonnes of solid obsidian, crashed down onto the terrible lizard, burying it and blocking the entrance to the temple. A few razor-sharp chips of obsidian rained down, and then there was silence.

Ginny looked around, scanning her torch around, taking in the interior for the first time.

The floor was highly-polished obsidian, as were the walls; a thick layer of dust coated everything, though through it gleamed the rich gold of... well, gold. It was everywhere. Railings, decorations, furniture — all golden. The beam of light from her torch went passed from gold object to gold object, each grander than the next.

Doors left the foyer on every wall, and wide, curving staircases stood on either side, still ready after all these centuries to carry worshippers to the inner sanctum of Molteplexl. Then she saw it.

A line of footsteps, pounded into the thick dust. They went up the main staircase, even grander than the side stairs, at the far end of the foyer.

She glanced back at the entrance; it was completely demolished.

"There'd bloody better be another way out," she muttered, as she headed for the inner sanctum.

*      *      *

Harry was lost. He'd stumbled around the temple for what felt like hours, and got more and more confused. There had been side temples, ranging from small chambers to large halls, all with rows of stone pews facing a blank and whitewashed wall. Each temple had an ornate pulpit at the very back, sometimes in a booth of its own. But none of them had held Clough.

He was making his way back to the foyer, intending to investigate the next door in line, when he heard the roar. Then there had been an explosion, and he had set off running.

As he swung into the foyer, he could have sworn he saw...

_Ginny?_

He blinked; sure enough, there she stood. But before he could catch her attention, she had run off to the far end of the foyer.

He ran for the curving stairs, and followed her.

*      *      *

The inner sanctum was huge. Not as large as the cavern outside, but large nevertheless; a quick glance at the pews suggested that it could have seated several hundred people, if not a thousand. A second glance revealed that there was a second level, a sort of balcony, which presumably could seat several hundred more.

It was dark here, lit only by vents in the side walls that let in dim shafts of light from the world outside; how the light was conducted there, given that they were underground, eluded Ginny, but she had bigger fish to fry.

The sanctum was, although Ginny could not know it, much like the smaller chapels Harry had seen, though on a much grander scale. The pews were coated in a reddish slime, which on closer inspection proved to be the mouldering remains of deep red upholstery. The floor sloped gently downwards, interrupted here and there by low steps, each adorned with an edge of pure gold.

At the front was a stage, and from a hemispherical pit in front of it came a flickering yellow glow, as though someone were standing in the pit with a candle.

Ginny drew one of her guns and stepped fully into the chamber, the torch in her other hand shining from beside the pistol, leading her way.

"Clough?" she called. "Come out of the pit slowly, and keep your hands where I can see them!"

She came to the forward edge of the balcony and, on an impulse, let the beam of light play upwards. There, above her, hung the largest chandelier she had ever seen, thousands of long-dry oil lamps bedecking a vast frame of rusty iron and dusty gold.

"Blooooody hell..." she breathed. Then she turned her attention back to the pit. "Clough! Are you in there?"

She hadn't expected a reply, but she got one; she was startled, however, to find that it came from behind her.

"No — but a single candle is."

A blast of actinic light seared past Ginny, several feet away, and the vast flat wall at the head of the chamber burst into gleaming, roiling life. In two long bounds, barely slowing, she leaped onto the row of pews and made for the front, springing from seat back to seat back.

With Clough behind and vortex in front, she ran.

Clough leapt from his seat in the back row and followed her, screaming in rage as she dived into the vortex.

*      *      *

Harry rounded the corner into the vast chamber in time to see Ginny swallowed up by the pulsing wall of light. He stumbled, exhaustion starting to take its toll, but ran on, gaining slowly but surely on Clough — but not fast enough. He was barely into the auditorium when Clough bolted up the stairs onto the stage, and into the vortex.

Its master through, the vortex started to close; its edges receded slowly from the edges of the wall, and it became clear that, while Harry would still be able to fit through, he would be unable to reach even the lower edge, let alone enter the vortex.

The familiar weight of the kangaroo-hide whip slapped against his thigh as he ran, and a thought struck him. He rounded on his heels and scrambled up the stairs, three steps at a time, to the balcony.

He ran down the balcony's centre aisle, panting Ginny's name under his breath, the thought of her spurring him on and helping him to focus on what had to be done.

He unhitched the whip, held it in his hand, ready to strike, pushed himself up and onto the burnished gold rail along the front of the balcony without breaking stride —

— and launched himself into space.

In the fraction of a second before he reached the apex of his leap, and the downwards plummet to the floor thirty feet below that would inevitably follow, his arm shot out, and the lash of the whip uncoiled at supersonic speed.

Its tip caught the ancient iron rim of the vast chandelier, which had hung undisturbed for centuries in the gloom, and wrapped solidly around it.

Clinging to the whip for dear life, Harry fell. His fall was, however, arrested by the whip and turned into a great deal of forward momentum, which carried him in a long arc, the chandelier creaking ponderously along above him.

He fell, down, forwards, slightly up again...

He let go.

His momentum propelled him forwards, into the rapidly-shrinking square of curling light, and he was gone.

Behind him, the vast and ancient chandelier, its long-rusted bolts and chains shaken loose of their precarious mounts, dropped. The recoiling chains in the loft above it struck the two-ton keystone holding the great dome over the auditorium, which was knocked out of place...

...and dropped. Having barely escaped the vast chain reaction that ensued, neither Harry nor Ginny would see the total collapse of the catacombs of Kekarce.


	6. Chapter 4: Shades of Gray

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Spenser and Sovran for yank-picking this chapter for me. And read it carefully - the changes between British English and American English are fairly significant...

##  **Chapter Four: Shades of Gray**

My eyes flickered open, and were met — as usual — by the drab gray ceiling of my office. Heavy rain spattered on the window, the sodium lights outside casting gray bands of light through the blinds. _I'd had a bugger of a headache a while ago, I remembered that much, but it had faded to a dull throb._ It was a day like a thousand others — though, I noted with curiosity, I couldn't actually remember any others specifically. My life was as it always had been...

> _...I just couldn't remember if it had always been like that yesterday._

Once I'd sat up and shaken the cobwebs out of my head, I leaned back against the file cabinet. It was going to be one of those days, I could feel it. Or one of those nights, rather; in my business, I rarely see days. It's a nocturnal job, but then I knew that going in. A job where everything goes in gray, where greenbacks are dark gray and whiskey bottles almost black.

Because I'm Harry Potter, P.I.

Business had been slow. Business was _always_ slow. I _like_ business slow. Slow business means nobody trying to kill me, and that's the thinking that had gotten me this far. Not much cash, but not many bullet holes either. Life was pretty good.

That's how I knew it couldn't last, but I hadn't expected things to change so fast, or arrive in such a pretty package, or be heralded by such a dainty, yet precise, knock on the door. I dropped my gray shoes off the gray desk to the gray rug, straightened my garish gray tie, and called her in.

What started it all was, of course, a dame. It's _always_ a dame. This one was better-looking than most; cute face, not as tall as she looked, great figure with curves in all the right places, and dressed real expensive in a white satin dress, with...

> _What the hell... _

She had red hair. Red hair and red lips. That was wrong, that was physically impossible... red was a color, and color didn't exist. For that matter, how the hell did I know what red was?

The questions just piled up, like a 47-car pileup on the interstate. And she hadn't even opened her mouth yet. _And what a mouth,_ that treacherous something at the back of my brain leered.

"Mr. Potter," she breathed, her voice silky like a vintage Scotch. She had an odd accent, clean and precise, though somehow off. "I need to retain your services."

She pushed a photo across the desk. It showed a rough-looking cat in a pinstriped suit, sucking on a fag...

> _...wait a minute, that sounded wrong... _

...smoking a cigarette. He looked a mean piece of work, pinched face and bulbous eyes shaded under a battered fedora.

"This man's name is Clough, Mr. Potter," she aspirated. "He's following me, and I think he means to kidnap me."

My headache was coming back. It was as though there was someone else, from somewhere else, in the back of my mind, trying to break through.

"Kidnap you? Why would he want to kidnap you?"

She raised a sarcastic eyebrow, cocking her head and her hip, showing off her figure again as if to say 'Look at me, you schmuck, why the hell wouldn't he?' She glared at me for a moment, then:

"Aren't you going to ask me to sit down?"

There was something familiar about her, about that glare... I got an odd feeling that I knew her, but from where? And names were drifting around the periphery of consciousness... Jenny? Sally? Something with —y, anyway.

"Sure," I said, rounding my desk like a greyhound and pulling up one of those office chairs on little wheels that never all go the same way at once. "Sit down," I told her, thrusting the chair towards her.

I sank onto my couch opposite her as she sat down and crossed... _oh God, crossed her legs..._ crossed her legs, perching her purse on her knee. She dug through it, pulled out a wooden stick — _a wand, mate, come on_ — a stick of some kind — _it's a bloody wand, you thick-headed pillock!_ — but it was as if I recognized it from somewhere, as if something was knocking at the back of my mind, trying to tell me something.

> _That's Ginny, for heaven's sake! You're here looking for her! You've got a wand of your own in the top drawer of your desk! THAT'S GINNY, RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU! _

She looked at the stick, paused for a moment as if she was as puzzled by it as I was. She ran a few fingernails over it in case it was a nail file, but she put it away when it didn't seem to do anything. I blinked, shook my head, but that damn buzzing wouldn't go away. Maybe...

"Doris?" I asked, pressing the intercom button on the wall above me. "Doris, do you have the radio on out there?"

The garbled squawk that I'd come to recognize as Secretary-Through-Intercom-speak translating roughly as "No, I'm doing the paperwork you forgot to do last week" squelched out through the tinny speaker. I pressed the button again.

"You're sure?"

I couldn't really make out the reply, but it sounded like "duck cough". I turned back to the dame.

"Oookay... well, why don't you tell me all about it from the top? Like, your name." I poured myself a glass of whiskey and split a capsule of aspirin into it, then downed it in a gulp.

"Van Wezel. Ginny van Wezel."

> _See! I told you so, you deaf bugger... Come on, just grab her, cast the portal spell, and let's get home! Okay? Home, remember, with the Burrow and Hogwarts and lots of colours? _

"Okay, Miss... Miss?" She nodded. "Miss Weas... van Wezel. Who's the goon?"

"Clough. He works for a shady character called Thomas De Mort. He wants me so he can capture and kill my fiancé, Harry Potter."

> _Are you stupid as well as deaf? Her fiancé has your name! Does that not strike you as odd at all? _

Something about the guy's name struck me as odd, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The headache was starting to fade, and I was starting to tune out that irritating, nagging buzz at the back of my mind.

"Why?"

"Harry's with the CIA, working on a big case. I don't know the details, but De Mort's behind it all. If Harry dies, De Mort gets away with it."

> _Anyone listening? Hello? Heeello? She sells sea shells on the sea shore, the shells she sells are sea shells I'm sure, are you stupid or something? Wibble? Monkeys? Oh, for god's sake... _

"And is your fiancé safe at the moment?"

"I don't know. I think so, otherwise they wouldn't be looking for me."

> _My brain, my body, my quest, and it's all ruined because some idiot behind a typewriter fifty years ago can't think straight._

I looked out the window. The bright gray neon of the city refracted in the raindrops rolling down the glass, a police siren cruised off into the night, and my headache was almost completely gone.

> _I don't know why I bother, I really don't. Why, I ought..._

As its last remnants drifted away, the case started to come into perspective.

"Leave your card. Go home. Lock everything. I'll be in touch. And take this." I fished one of my backup guns, a snub .38, from a drawer and handed it to her; she took it, nervously.

"You'll catch him?"

"Sure."

And I knew I would. Because I'm Harry Potter, P.I.

*      *      *

My first — and, as it turned out, only — stop that night was a bar I knew. I had gone to interview some of my informants, but I may have gotten sidetracked.

I don't remember much else of that night.

*      *      *

My head was pounding; this time, though, it wasn't the strange headache that had plagued me the day before, it was a perfectly ordinary hangover. The usual suspects were lined up — the furry tongue, the world spinning around me — but the big whammy was the throbbing, pounding sledgehammers behind my eyes. And it wasn't made any better by my goddamned phone ringing... and ringing... and ringing...

I picked it up, knocking over the table lamp as I scrabbled. The voice at the other end was terrified, hurried, and hers.

"Mr. Potter?"

"Mm-hmph."

"He's here! In the house!"

A shot rang out over the line — that sure woke me up.

"Are you OK?"

"I missed him! He's here! Hurry!" There was a clunk, a thump, a scuffle... then nothing.

"Miss Van Wezel? Jenny? Are you there?"

She didn't reply.

I hung up the phone and sat up. Some damn bright thing — the damned sun, I guess, but I could be wrong — was shining in through the blinds, and things had just gotten a lot more complicated.

I needed a drink. I needed life insurance. I needed a vacation. I needed a house in the country. What I had was a hat, a coat, and a gun. I put them on and headed out.

*      *      *

An hour and forty-eight minutes later — long story; detours, roadworks, engine trouble... I don't want to talk about it — and I was at her door. There were no signs of forced entry, just perfectly white marble, varnished mahogany and polished brass, reflecting that damn sun back in my eyes. I glanced round to the back yard, but couldn't get far because of the iron gates. And the Dobermans.

So I went back to the front door and rang the bell. Nobody answered. I tried to kick it in, but really only managed to dent my ankle; the only option was to go to the service entrance round the side.

That was locked too.

But that wasn't a major problem, because the locked door was lying on the floor just inside the splintered frame. I stepped inside, careful not to make too much noise, and found myself in the kitchen. It was empty, but a trail of muddy footprints let out into a hallway. I followed them.

The corridor emerged into a really swanky dining room, the kind of place where I might be able to afford one of the place-mats.

If I saved up.

For a year.

I continued following the tracks. They paused by an open door, where the last of the mud was smudged as if a couple of guys had stood there kicking their heels for a while. A couple of cigarette butts were ground into the Persian carpet. And the door had a hole in it, about the right size for a .38 and ringed with the greasy lead smear of an unjacketed slug like the ones I loaded my backup revolver with.

I drew my .45 auto and crept up to the doorway. I listened for a while, didn't hear anything, so I swung in through the door and scanned the room.

It was empty. Well, when I say "empty", I mean "empty of bad guys", not "empty of stuff". It was _full_ of stuff. Persian rugs, busts, statues, paintings, a chandelier the size of my car. And a side table with a phone beside it.

The phone was off the table, the earpiece was off the hook, and the cord was out of the wall. No wonder the line had gone dead.

I stepped inside the room and hit the lights, and that's when I saw it.

Gleaming a rich, dark gray on the floor was a pool of blood. Nearby, only a foot or two from the blood, lay the .38 I had given her.

I walked over to it, carefully listening for any sign of company, but whoever had been there, there was no way they were going to be anything but long gone.

I took a knee by the gun, wrapped the grip in a handkerchief, and picked it up. I flicked the cylinder open and ejected the cartridges; two of them had been fired. But I had only heard one shot, and that pool of blood on the elegant parquet floor had me worried.

She'd been here. She'd tried to shoot somebody here, and somebody had bled here. I found myself really hoping that wasn't her.

I looked around, scanning the room with my flashlight. I couldn't see any more bullet holes.

Suddenly there was a tremendous crash as the front door burst open. I looked up to find myself staring down the barrels of a couple of police .38 specials.

Behind them, once I'd managed to focus beyond the guns — they had a pretty understandable ability to hold my attention — were two cops. They were holding the guns. One was short and scrawny, and, when he eventually spoke, spoke in a high, squeaky voice. The other... well, I had to assume he was human, because he was the right size (more or less) to fit in his uniform, he walked on two legs, and to the best of my knowledge there's no such thing as trolls.

> _Yes there is... are... oh, why do I bother?_

"Drop the gun and put your hands on your head!" one of them shouted. I did, in roughly that order.

"I'm on your side, guys. Harry Potter, P.I. I'm here to check on one of my clients."

"Sure you are," Zog the Troll said. "And you don't got nothin' to do with the shots fired, I bet."

"I gave her the gun, if that's what you mean. And I was talking to her on the phone when she fired it. And I have a hunch who she fired it at."

They glanced at each other then, and Squeaky reached into my inside pocket. He found my credentials, and they had a quick, muttered conference over them for about a minute before they both holstered their revolvers.

"Okay," Squeaky squeaked, "say we buy it for now. You still gotta come with us to the precinct."

I sighed, shaking my head. "No," I said, "I'm not the guy you're looking for."

"You're not the guy we're looking for?" Zog asked. "We're not looking for anyone... yet."

"I can go about my business." I waved my hand vaguely in front of him; I'm not sure why.

"You have business?"

"Move along."

"OK," Zog sighed. "Move along. Frank, better call it in."

Squeaky went over to the phone, hooked the earpiece back on, then lifted it up and listened intently.

He frowned, then rattled the hook a bit.

"Hello? Operator?" he yakked into the horn. I sauntered over there.

"Allow me." I picked up the cord off the floor and plugged it back in the wall. "Try it now."

He tweaked the hook a couple times more, then put the earpiece to his head again. "Operator?"

The result seemed to satisfy him, and after a moment's wait he spent a couple of minutes talking Cop at someone on the other end. He finally hung up and came back over to us.

"The Sarge says the guy can go if he leaves his card."

I fished one out of my pocket and handed it to him.

"You guys can send me a receipt for that snub gun, by the way," I said, pointing to it. "I'll be wanting it back after it's finished its stint as Exhibit F."

Zog nodded, and pulled out a paper bag to go get it. Squeaky stopped him.

"Uh, Steve, he said not to touch anything."

"Like the phone, you mean?" I asked gently. The glare I got indicated his appreciation for the remark.

"You can go. You'll be getting a call. Don't leave town, don't shoot anybody, drive carefully, you know the drill. And don't be a damn smart-ass."

I grinned, and patted my trilby down onto my head.

"Sure," I said. "And say hi to McGinty when he gets here. Let him know we're still on for the game next week."

Their jaws dropped. "You know the sa..."

I had already turned, and was on my way out the door. "See you, boys," I called over my shoulder. "Take good care of the place."

I left the two cops guarding the house, got in my car and headed out.

*      *      *

> _"Say, Steve, what time is it?" Squeaky asked as the gumshoe drove off.  
> "Wait a minute," Zog said, rummaging in the pockets of his uniform, "I've got it written down here on a piece of paper. A nice man wrote the time down for me this morning."  
> "Why do you carry it around with you?"  
> "Well, if anybody asks me the time, I can show it to them."  
> "Oooh... Wait a minute."  
> "What?"  
> "It's written on this bit of paper, but it's eight o'clock that's written."  
> "Yeah. Um, when I asked the fella to write it down, it was eight o'clock."  
> "Well... what if, when somebody asks you the time, it isn't eight o'clock?"  
> "Then I don't show it to 'em."  
> He contemplated this for a moment. Then a thought struck him.  
> "Hold on... how do you know when it's eight o'clock?"  
> "I've got it written down on a piece of paper."  
> The incontrovertible logic of this seemed to satisfy Squeaky, and he observed the paper with renewed envy.  
> "I wish I could afford a piece of paper with the time written on."  
> "Yup."  
> "Hey, Steve, let me hold that piece of paper to my ear?"  
> "Sure." He handed the folded piece of note paper over. Squeaky held it to his ear and listened intently.  
> "Hey, Steve..."  
> "Yeah?"  
> "This piece of paper ain't goin'."  
> "WHAT?" Zog yanked it back and listened, then glared at it. "I've been sold a forgery!"  
> "No wonder it's stopped at eight o'clock!"  
> "Damn it!"  
> "You should get one of those things my grandpa's got. His company gave it to him when he retired."  
> "Oh?"  
> "It's one of them things what wakes you up at eight o'clock, boils the kettle and pours a cup of coffee."  
> "Oh yeah, one of them... what's it called..."  
> "My grandma."  
> "Well..." A rare doubt pounded its way into Zog's rather thick skull for a moment. "How does she know when it's eight o'clock?"  
> "She's got it written down on a piece of paper."_

*      *      *

During that interlude I'd had time to drive to Green Street, where this De Mort guy was supposed to live. His house was a big brownstone, almost as impressive as the Van Wezel place. I parked half a block down the street and made my way round the back.

This place had a wall, but that was it. No dogs, no wire. Easy.

I climbed over the wall and dropped into the back yard. A few cars were parked there, and a trail of blood drops led from one of them to a garage in one corner of the yard. I followed the trail.

The door to the garage was well oiled, and so slid quietly and smoothly open. I paused at the door for a moment, listening, but the silence was the relaxed silence of a room with nobody in it rather than the cautious silence of someone being real quiet.

I crept in, stumbling slightly over something — a piece of wire? — on the floor. Still nobody. I turned on my flashlight.

Turns out, it was the relaxed silence of a room with nobody _alive_ in it.

The guy was lying on a board in the middle of the floor. Even without the handkerchief over his head, I'd have known that he was definitely dead. In fact, it'd be hard to be any more dead while still having all the bits attached.

He had a bandage around his chest, but it had been put on by a moron; the goon had kept leaking after he got here, at least if the puddle around him was anything to go by.

I reached for the cloth to see if it was the guy who'd been following the broad, but just as I was about to yank it off, the side door bust open and two guys charged in.

In retrospect, I should be more careful with what I stumble over.

"Hold it right there, friend," said one of the thugs — a slick hood in a sharp suit, pointing a cavernous muzzle at my face — in the kind of tone that suggests the word 'friend' should not be taken literally. His buddy, a gorilla in greasy coveralls, tucked a Derringer back in his pocket and thumped me over the head.

About a minute later my hands were cuffed, King Kong had my .45, and I was being led across the yard and into the house. It was darker and warmer than the Van Wezel place, with lots of leather and wood, but I had other things on my mind than architecture.

"Where are we going?" I asked as we headed up the stairs.

"Mr. De Mort axed to see ya," the gorilla said.

"I've got a choice?"

"Nope."

"Then I'd be delighted to accept his most kind and generous invitation."

"Shut up."

They shoved me into a small lounge and dumped me on a couch next to a bored-looking black guy with his hands cuffed much like mine.

"Sit here, friend," said the goon in the suit. "Move if you want to die."

"Yur," said King Kong.

I didn't, so I did. The goons disappeared through the double doors, and they slammed shut.

"What'd Killer Joe catch you for, man?" the black guy asked amiably, as if he was just passing the time.

"He didn't appreciate me visiting without an appointment. You?"

"He likes me a lot less than his wife does."

I gave a sardonic chuckle. "Well, I guess neither of us are gonna be popular in the next room, then." I gestured to my cuffed wrists. "I'd shake your hand, but..."

He laughed out loud.

"Sheeyut, man, these suckers use standard police cuffs! Interchangeable keys!" He fidgeted behind his back for a few seconds, and then his hands emerged unshackled. A shiny silver key was in his hand. "I always carry one with me."

A few moments later, my hands were free as well. We shook.

"Jack McGuffin," he said. "They call me 'Brother Jack'."

"Harry Potter. P.I."

"You're not here for me?" he asked, raising a cautious eyebrow.

"You know, Jack, I'm just trying to get a girl back. If you didn't take her, you're not on my list."

He grinned.

"Is Tommy?"

"Oh yeah."

"Need a hand?"

"Sure."

"Okay." He nodded, and we started eyeing up the door to De Mort's office. "What's the plan?"

I hadn't thought that far.

"Well, we need to get one of the guys alive. And the girl could be in there. So if we..."

** _CRUNCH_ **

I barely flinched this time when I heard the door crumple inwards. I was getting used to it.

"Who's trying to shoot me this time?" I asked nonchalantly over my shoulder.

"We're not here for you, pal, just get out of our way."

I looked up. There were three of them this time, in defiance of tradition, and almost as if they were deliberately trying to flout Chandler's Law, all three were women. Very definitely women. With guns. And just to instill terror in the hearts of men, one of them had a Tommy gun, and she held it like someone who knows how to use it.

"Stay," the blonde with the Tommy ordered as she strode past. I nodded.

Another kick sent the double doors flying into the office; they walked in, somebody started to say "Who the..."

Then all hell broke loose.

First was a .38, I think. Or maybe it just sounded weedy compared to the dry cracks of a 1911, and they were both drowned out by the roar of the Tommy gun.

Then the noise stopped. A couple of plings echoed as the last few casings bounced to the floor. And then the three breezed back out as if nothing had happened, their guns still smoking.

One of them paused by the table, picked up the phone, dialed a number, and, after a moment, spoke.

"Charlie? We're all done here. Yeah, we're heading back to the agency. Yeah, we'll see... well, hear from you then."

With that, she hung up and followed the others out. The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five seconds.

"Hooooly sh..." Jack began.

"Yeah," I said.

"We should..."

"Yeah."

We stood and headed into the office. The scene didn't disappoint.

Thomas De Mort was in his chair behind the huge desk. He was dead. He was _really_ dead. And if he wasn't dead, he was at least really well air conditioned. The goons were dead too, sprawled on the floor with their brains up the walls.

"..." Jack said.

"Yeah," I agreed.

"So much for asking him about your girl."

"She's not _my_ girl per se," I corrected him distractedly, still staring at the mess behind the desk.

A whimper nudged me out of my reverie, and I turned, instinctively reaching for the currently empty holster on my belt.

In the corner, curled up in a whimpering ball of cowardice, sat Clough. It had to be him. The bulging eyes, the short stature... he looked just like the photo. I frisked one of the dead goons and found my .45 stuck in his belt. A quick press-check revealed that he'd left it cocked and locked, which suited me fine. I yanked Clough to his feet.

"Where's the girl?" I demanded.

"What girl?" he sniveled, turning his head to avoid looking at the carnage.

"The girl. Van Wezel."

"I don't know!"

I spun him round and slammed him face first onto the desk.

"Hidden door!" he screamed, a thin trickle of blood appearing below his nose. "Behind the bookcase!"

I glanced to the side, and Jack headed to the bookcase. He studied the shelves, pulling at random books.

"How does it open?" he asked. I grabbed Clough by the collar and pulled him over to the wall.

"Hold him," I told Jack. "And stay over by the far wall."

They backed off as instructed, and I surveyed the bookcase. There had to be a hidden latch somewhere, but I couldn't figure where. I got tired of hunting, and instead got a good grip on the thing and climbed to the ceiling. I grabbed the rail at the top of the bookcase, planted my feet firmly against the wall, and _pulled_.

As the bookcase pulled away from the wall, I started to reconsider the wisdom of my method.

As the bookcase started to fall, I was squeezing my eyes shut in anticipation of the pain to come.

> _You bloody idiot..._

Then there was no more bookcase to support me, and gravity took over.

Ow.

The next thing I knew, Jack was pulling me out of a pile of books, splinters, and plaster. A quick check established that, yup, there was a spot — one of the fingers on my left hand — that wasn't hurting.

Ow.

"You okay, man?"

"Yeah..." I said. "Mostly."

Clough just gaped, from where he had tumbled to the floor.

"Can you walk?" Jack asked.

"I'm not gonna like it, but sure."

"Good."

"Why?"

"'Cause we got a door."

I looked up. There, in the wall, was a rectangular opening. A couple of metal brackets marked where the middle section of bookcase had been attached, and a narrow staircase led up into the darkness.

Jack pulled me to my feet, and I turned to Clough.

"She's up there?"

He nodded dumbly, and I set off up the stairs, releasing the safety on my retrieved gun. Jack followed, pushing Clough up the stairs ahead of him.

"Is the guy bonkers?" I heard Clough ask; by the sound of it, the only reply he got was a clip on the back of the head.

The stairs ended in a rough wooden floor. A quick fumble provided a light switch, which I flipped.

And there she was. She lay, still in that great white dress, on a cot in a cell of chicken wire. She stirred as the light came on, then yawned and sat up.

"I can't tell you anyth—" She looked up. "Harry!"

She sprang to her feet, throwing herself against the mesh.

"Hold on, Miss Van W, I'll have you out of there in a minute."

"Um, Mr. Detective?" Clough interrupted from behind me.

"Just be quiet," I said, "I have to get her out."

"But..."

"Zip it."

I examined the cell. It was well made, no doubt about it; the joints were both bolted and welded, the mesh was made with heavy-gauge wire, and the lock was heavy and solid. I tried kicking the door, which had much the same effect as it had had back at her house.

"Um..." Clough started to say, but a death glare silenced him.

"Better back off a bit, Miss." I raised the gun again and drew a bead on the padlock, squeezing off a round into it. It ricocheted off the heavy steel, tearing a ragged hole in the floorboards by my feet.

A moment later I'd stopped skipping long enough to examine the lock. It was dented, but that was about all.

"Um..." Clough started again. I spun round, my trigger finger daring him to say the wrong thing.

"WHAT?!"

"Um..." He pulled a glinting metal object from his jacket pocket. "I have the key."

"Oh." I was momentarily given pause, then I lowered the gun. "Well, good."

A moment later, Ginny was in my arms, a sensation that felt oddly familiar from somewhere, and not at all unpleasant. There was a genteel cough from behind me.

"I'll leave you two kids alone," Jack said, and I could hear the smirk in his voice. Ginny and I both spun.

"Oh no," I began, "we're not..."

"It's not like..."

"Exactly, we're just..."

"Yeah, kinda like..."

"So yeah."

Jack's eyebrow had risen, thinly-veiled hilarity clear on his face.

"Sure, kids. Whatever you say." He nudged me in the ribs. "She deserves a nice room and some supper, fella." I gaped.

"But... I'm not..."

But he'd already gone down the stairs, taking Clough with him. I turned back to Ginny, looking apologetic. She, on the other hand, was looking speculative.

"I'm sorry about that, Miss V..."

"Shut up," she said, coming to a conclusion and spinning me into an embrace, "and kiss me."

> _Ye gods, does anyone talk like that? Not that I'm complaining..._

So I did.

It may have gone on for some time, or it may not, I'm not sure. But footsteps coming up the stairs dragged us apart. And that damn headache was coming back.

"What?" I demanded as Clough came back up the stairs.

He sagged, dejected.

"I'm tired," he sighed. "I've been chasing her for weeks, I've had you on my bloody tail since Ottery, and I'm bloody sick of it."

"What the hell are you talking about, man?" I hadn't heard of either of them until the day before, and I didn't have a clue who Ottery was.

"Oh, drop the accent."

> _He knows! Someone who isn't me has a clue! Oh, thank heavens..._

"What accent?"

"I don't have an accent," added Ginny, which wasn't strictly true; she had a great, cultured Louisiana accent. "You've got an accent, though."

"Who?" I said.

"Not you, him."

"Him?" Clough said. "I don't have an accent."

"Yeah, kinda do," I said, but Ginny cut us off.

"Damn it, who's Ottery?"

Clough giggled, the kind of desperate giggle that's thirty seconds from tears. He gestured to the cot before sagging down in a seat opposite. We sat.

"You live in Ottery St Catchpole. In England," he said. "Your name's Ginny..."

> _Ginny Weasley. Your... my... our girlfriend._

"Weasley," I said. I don't know why. I don't know how I knew. But Clough seemed to have an inkling, because he latched onto it like a drowning man onto a liferaft.

"Yes! You know!" He was leaning forward, eyes wide. "She's Ginny Weasley, you're Harry Potter, and I kidnapped her from The Burrow on the Dark Lord's orders!"

Amnesia. That had to be it. We'd been dosed with something, forgotten things, and they were starting to come back to us, that had to be it. We had to be from out of town, that was the only explanation. One thing bothered me, though...

> _If you're from out of town, how come you're working as a detective?_

...how had I been working?

Something was nagging at me, like a voice at the back of my mind. I really needed an Aspirin. And something he was saying didn't make sense. Or, worse, it did make sense and just didn't fit with the reality I knew. Then something else caught Ginny's attention.

"Who's the Dark Lord?"

Clough stared at the ceiling for a long moment.

"He's Lord Voldemort. I only joined because my uncle was a Death Eater."

"Death Eater?" But he shook his head — never mind.

"I got assigned a simple courier job. A sort of initiation. I've always been bollocks at this sort of stuff, so getting something like this... it's an honour, y'know?"

"A courier job's an honor?"

"Yeah, it's an honour if you do it well." He shrugged. "Which I sort of don't."

Memories started clicking into place, engrams slotting into notches in my mind, and something was ringing true. The sensation of familiarity with Ginny, the nagging suspicion that I'd been chasing someone for weeks. I wasn't sure who I was or who she was, but I knew for damn sure who she was to me.

"So you did the job... kidnapping Ginny?"

He nodded slowly. "It all went wrong. And then you followed me in."

Ginny had been silent for some time, but she finally spoke.

"Why are you telling us this, if you were trying to kidnap me?"

He gave another of his little giggles, and I got the distinct impression that he wasn't in possession of a full complement of marbles.

"Why not? You've been getting away from me for weeks, wonderboy here's been chasing me for weeks, and neither of you stand still for a second. Voldepillock's scary when he's waving a wand about, but he can barely cross a room on foot. You two are scarier, and I haven't seen either of you cast a single spell yet."

"Spells?"

> _Things were falling into place. I could feel it. _

"Never mind. Truth is, I just can't be buggered to do it any more. He's not after the good of anyone, he just wants to rule. It's worth a bit of a chase, but not this much. The work, the servility, the bowing and bloody scraping... Sod him. I'm out."

"Out of... Voldemort's club?"

"Yeah. You two will want to go home," he said. "Or at least, I guess you will once you remember where it is. And I want to go... well, somewhere." He turned and gazed out the window for a moment.

I nodded. "Okay." Then he turned back, abruptly.

"Look, just tell me one thing," Clough said, his brow furrowed. "You've been chasing me all this way just to get this girl. Why?"

I stared at him. "Eh?"

"I mean, what's so special about her? I mean, we broke guys out of Azkaban, but they're, y'know, experts at stuff. Why are you going to so much trouble to get a schoolgirl back?"

> _Finally! A way in... now, if I can only find a way to break back..._

...into my mind, and it was all suddenly clear.

I stared blankly at nothing for a moment. Then— "I love her." At this, Ginny spun to face me with a gasp, but my attention was still on Clough.

"You mean..." He seemed to be wrestling with an unfamiliar concept. "You mean you don't want her for what she can do?"

"No."

"For..."

"For who she is."

He sagged, then sank to his haunches. "I think," he started slowly, "that I would prefer that."

His sudden turn had taken me by surprise. "What do you mean?"

"Well, could you, y'know, put in a good word for me with your side? When we get back?"

"Back?" Ginny asked, getting more and more confused.

"Back to our dimension."

Ginny looked questioning, and I don't imagine I looked much more intelligent at the time.

"We don't belong here?" I asked. Clough looked genuinely surprised.

"You mean you haven't figured it out? The portals, jumping us between dimensions? It was supposed to just let me grab the girl, jump into a dimension where that ruckle you live in is unwarded, but I think I made a... tiny little mistake with the incantation."

"What mistake, exactly?" Ginny's expression was dangerous.

"Um. Well, it seems I accidentally created a portal to leap us into the magical world of movies."

"Wait," I said, a sense of recognition fading into my mind. "We're in a film?"

"A film?" Ginny said. "What's a film?"

This stopped our musings for a moment; Clough and I joined forces to explain the muggle concept of films.

"So we're in a film."

"Seems so."

"So everything I know and remember...?"

"The film — the story — imposes itself on you."

"Oh, that's just great. How are we supposed to get home? What, we just yell _Cut_ or some..."

The world stopped.

Everything went black, a strange flapping sound fading away with the last of the light. Memories, identities, fragments started flowing back, pouring into my brain. Then there was an odd sensation, like a perspective shifting, as though I were suddenly someone else, outside myself, a dispassionate observer of my own personal epic. As always, however, Ginny had a rather more succinct way of summarising my philosophical musings.

"What the bloody bollocking hell..." her voice drifted out of the oleaginous celluloid blackness. Harry was about to add his voice to the chorus, when, out of some last nod to convention, a low blue light faded out of nowhere, not really doing anything other than illuminating the darkness so they could see it better.

"I don't know why," Harry muttered slowly, "but I've got this strange feeling that I should have a sheet around my waist."

"Or an ice pick," Ginny added wryly, though she was not sure why.

Harry looked around, gradually realising that colours were seeping slowly back into the world. He still wore his trenchcoat — which, he realised, was a rather unflattering chocolatey brown that he for some reason he couldn't quite put his finger on found oddly appealing — and Ginny still wore the dress that he really hoped against hope that she'd keep when they got home, but they were both returning to their normal proportions.

The world around them was still gone, though.

"So, um... how do we get home now?"

Clough pulled his wand out. "We open the portal again and jump through. It might take a few jumps, though," he added sheepishly.

"What, jump randomly until we hit the right film? We've been there, that guy looked nothing like me."

"No," Clough said, shaking his head. "The portal's cyclic, I think. Sooner or later it should return us to the place where it was cast. Eventually."

He paused, something Harry had come to recognise as an indicator of his mildly deranged mind about to leap to another track.

"I was wondering," he said, his brain freewheeling on the express train of negotiable sanity. "Can I... inconvenience Voldemort at all?"

Ginny and Harry exchanged a glance. Then they smirked.

"Have you ever heard of horcruces?" Harry asked.

They spent some time explaining what they were and how they worked, with the occasional digression to summarise Voldemort's various transgressions. Clough had seemed particularly shocked to hear of murders and attacks on hospitals, and by the end of the conversation he sat, shocked, his mouth opening and closing like a stoned goldfish.

"The bloody bastard..." he breathed, and they knew that they had him.

"Clough," Ginny asked cautiously. "You're coming with us? Help us fight Voldemort?"

Clough hesitated, then a manic smile formed on his face. "I think I have a better idea. The Hor-things, they resurrect him if he dies?"

"Yes."

"And each one will be used up when it resurrects him?" A giggle punctuated the sentence.

"Yes."

He seemed to reach a conclusion. "Then I have an idea."

This gained him their undivided attention.

"Well, the way I see it, the fewer hor-wossnames he's got, the easier he'll be for you to kill, right?"

"Right."

"And if you don't have to chase down so many, you can get to him sooner, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, if I can kill him a couple of times..."

Harry raised an eyebrow, impressed.

"You'd do that?"

"Well..." He shrugged, a frown of determined desperation flitting across his face. "I mean, he's killing all these people, he's made me kidnap you —" He nodded at Ginny. "— and made me turn myself into a criminal... it's the least I can do. Right?"

Harry and Ginny stared at him for a second, then Harry spoke.

"You know, Professor Dumbledore kept saying that Snape was the bravest man around. Well-"

He was interrupted as the vast blackness behind them burst silently to life, a bright white rectangle appearing out of nowhere. It was marked with a circle and divided into rectangular quarters much like the crosshairs of a... whatever it was. It flickered, rotating sectors counting out the seconds as they ticked by, marked by occasional ephemeral sigils.

They stared, startled, at the enormous spectacle for several seconds, but it did not seem to be doing anything else, so they ignored it once more.

"Well," Harry continued, "bollocks to that. I tell you one thing, mate; if you can pull it off, you'll have played a big part in putting things back the way they should be."

"Not to interrupt the back-patting, boys," Ginny said, clamping a hand on Harry's shoulder, "but speaking of putting things back the way they should be... How _do_ we get back?"

"Well, the spell was 'Postulo Foris'..." He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. "'Postulo Foris Sinescutum', and that was supposed to take me to a parallel Burrow with no shields..."

"Postulo Foris..." A sudden flash of recognition flared in Ginny's mind.

"Harry," she exclaimed, "it's a variant portal spell, just for travelling between realities rather than ordinary places! That must be what the mundofinitis clause is for!"

Harry goggled at her for a moment. "Ginny... How do you know that?"

The vast ticking icon continued flickering, now throwing building-sized numbers into the centre of the crosshairs.

"You can talk — you're the one who decided to skip seventh year. It's in the books! _Practical Ostiomancy and Isolocal Applications_, seventh-year Arithmancy! It's all based on Al-Khwarizmi's Vermicular Tunneler."

"You're turning into Hermione," Harry teased, impressed, but quickly turned serious again. "All right, how do we get back?"

Ginny glared at him for a moment, then: "Easy, if it uses the standard Hawking magorithms." She pulled out her wand and pointed it at the empty blackness opposite the vast screen. "_Postulo Foris Origo_."

Behind them, the huge, flickering numbers continued to count down.

_\- tick -  
**12**_

The beam this time was different, a tight lance of light that focussed on a point before them, then widened and spread as the portal opened. Ginny lowered her wand, but the flickering pyramid of light remained; for a moment, out of the corner of his eye, Harry imagined he could hear and see a boxy, clattering shadow linger in the air at its apex, but when he looked directly at it, it was gone. But the portal was there, and that, for now, was all that mattered.

_\- tick -  
**9**_

"Home?" he asked Ginny.

_\- tick -  
**6**_

"Home."

_\- tick -  
**4**_

They stepped forward together, toward the iridescent flux of the screen. They paused for a moment before entering.

_\- tick -  
**3**_

"Aren't you coming?" Harry asked, seeing Clough hang back. Clough shook his head, grinning out a disconcerting giggle.

_\- tick -  
**2**_

"I've got one more stop to make," he said. "You go on ahead."

_\- tick -  
**1**_

And so they did.

_\- tick -  
**0**_

> (A moment later, in a flare of grand, orchestral diegesis, because the universe loves a joke as much as anyone, the music swelled, heralding the start of a new tale — _Hollywood Or What II: The Revenge Of Clough_.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "What Time Is It, Eccles" lifted almost verbatim from The Goon Show, by Spike Milligan.


	7. Epilogue: That's All, Fawkes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, finally - the end of the story! (Although there's a crib sheet coming up, which is ironically the longest chapter of them all...)

##  **Epilogue: That's All, Fawkes**

"Okay," Harry said, as they sat panting on the grass where the vortex had dropped them. "You can come."

Ginny's face lit up. She glanced furtively around, finding the woods behind the Burrow devoid of potential interruptions, and rolled Harry onto his back, a move which reminded him that she had left her t-shirt on the floor of the bathroom. With a muttered "Told you so," she kissed him.

They postponed their return to the Burrow, at least for a few hours.

*      *      *

_Clough rolled to a stop, thudding painfully against a wall. Everything hurt. His back hurt, his head hurt, his brain hurt. He wasn't entirely convinced that he knew_ who _he was any more, either. But he knew his mission. He knew what he'd been told to do and where it had led. He knew who had told him to do it._

And he was bloody annoyed.

Several hours later, after a long, brisk walk, he entered the ancient crypt system below the ruined abbey in a small village named Kirkpevril. He identified himself to the Death Eaters who challenged him as he entered the lower level — they seemed curious about the large, shrouded object hovering before him, but he ignored them — then descended a long, curving staircase.

He continued into the bowels of the crypts, until a set of old, dark oak doors swung open at the end of the corridor. Within lay the Dark Lord's lair, the inner sanctum, the centre of operations. He left the strange draped thing outside and sauntered in.

"Mr Clough," the wheedling voice drifted through the gloom. "You have the Weasley girl?"

Clough looked at him for a moment, then, with an accent that he did not recognise...

"I'll be back."

Voldemort stared in astonishment at Clough's retreating back.

"Lucius, has he gone insane?"

"If he hadn't got the girl he would surely not have returned, my Lord. Not voluntarily, at least."

"Very well," Voldemort muttered. "And don't call me Shirley," he added, though he could not for the life of him tell why.

Malfoy glanced at Voldemort for a moment, surprised. He was about to speak, when a rumbling sound drifted in from the corridor.

"Um... what's that?" a cowled Death Eater in the corner said, voicing the assembled Death Eaters' shared concern.

The roar was increasing in volume, a deep, throaty growl, like a whole herd of giant mutant lions purring.

"My Lord," Malfoy hazarded, "You don't suppose..."

The great oak doors, which had stood for almost eight centuries, erupted into splinters. In a cloud of smoke and dust, an angry, snarling beast of chrome and deep red metal skidded into the chamber, mere feet in front of Voldemort.

It was a large motorcycle. It skidded round almost 180 degrees to face in the general direction of the door.

The beast sat in the centre of the room, oozing the sort of effortless menace that says to all present something along the lines of "I know where you live, and the only thing stopping you from being killed to death is that right now I'd rather be snoozing". But what shocked the Death Eaters more than that was the figure sitting astride it.

It was Clough. Somehow — and heaven knows why, given how dark it was in the chamber — he had acquired a set of dark glasses that now covered his eyes, concealing any flicker of emotion that might once have resided there. He turned, looking over his shoulder at Voldemort.

He drew a heavy-looking lever-action shotgun from a pannier on the bike and spun it round his hand, cocking it. Somehow, the move — which should by rights have broken his knuckles — instead ended with the gun aimed squarely between Voldemort's eyes.

"Hasta la vista, Voldy."

The gun fired, with a thunderclap like a cross between a cannon and the end of the world. And then, before Voldemort's headless body had time to hit the floor, there was a screech of tyres, and in a cloud of white smoke, Clough and his bike had disappeared back down the corridor.

The Death Eaters, stunned, gradually started edging forwards.

"Is he...?"

Lucius stepped forward, gesturing for them to keep away from the corpse. The drops of gore and shreds of flesh were rolling across the ground, coalescing and joining, all heading for Voldemort's lifeless cadaver.

"No. The Dark Lord is protected by powerful magic. He will-" Already Voldemort's head was reforming, life returning to his limbs. "-soon be alive again. He cannot die, not for long."

> _(In a dark cupboard in a dark house on Grimmauld Place, a locket crumbled into dust.)___

Slowly, shakily, Voldemort stood, his head lolling to one side; the force of the shotgun slug impacting his face had shattered several vertebrae in his neck. He rolled his head lazily, a bony crumbling sound as his spine healed itself. He stood for a moment, face turned towards the ground, eyes closed as the final pieces of flesh slotted into place.

Then, slowly, he opened his eyes and raised his glowing eyes to the door.

"Whoever let Clough back in," he hissed, "kill them. And if he has the temerity to return, he will not leave."

Three Death Eaters headed for the door, anxious to be the first to carry out their master's bidding — and of course, if they hurried, there was always the chance of capturing Clough.

Soon after they had left, Voldemort had developed a variant shielding charm which, he resolved, he would cast if Clough tried to point another of those muggle devices at him. Barely had he completed that thought before there was an actinic glow outside, a rippling light filtering through the fug in the corridor. It was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and then...

...Clough stood in the doorway. He was pushing before him what looked like a muggle office chair, with a television and a large quantity of modelling clay attached to the seat with sellotape.

Voldemort watched in amazement as Clough, seemingly unperturbed, rolled the chair into the centre of the chamber. He stopped there, cocked his head like a curious animal, and looked straight at Voldemort, a manic gleam in his eye.

"Not even a scar..." he mused, seemingly to himself. Then he cleared his throat and spoke.

"Didn't take, I suppose. Whoops."

The Dark Lord raised a questioning eyebrow at the strange contraption. Clough — or was he? He wasn't sure any longer — raised a foot and kicked the chair towards Voldemort, a mad smile creasing his face. Strange and unfamiliar thoughts hurtled through his increasingly schizophrenic mind, and it may have been one of them that made him grasp for a suitable phrase to utter.

"Yippie-ki-yay, mother Hubbard," he spat, wandlessly blasting a hex towards the chair.

Things suddenly happened very fast. The television imploded, sending a sharp current into the eight blocks of C4 strapped to its side, and the device detonated in a flash of light and smoke, silhouetting shadowy forms against the blast.

> _(Deep beneath Gringott's Bank, in a vault owned by Bellatrix Lestrange, Hufflepuff's cup fell apart, its smouldering shards blasted by an invisible explosion.)_

The smoke eventually dissipated, revealing a scene of carnage. Those Death Eaters who had been nearest Voldemort lay unmoving on the ground. Others cowered, covering their ears, rivulets of blood trickling from ruptured eardrums. Lucius Malfoy had been all but vaporised. And scattered over the floor and walls of the chamber, slowly rolling and coalescing and reforming, were the constituent parts of Voldemort.

In the centre of the chamber, shrinking into thin air, hung a brightly glowing silver rectangle.

Nobody ever saw Edwin Clough, two-time member of the exclusive Slayers Of Voldemort club, ever again.

*      *      *

"If Clough managed to do what he said, we should have an easier job of it with the Horcruces now," Harry said. It was several hours later; after he and Ginny (wearing Harry's jumper) had eventually returned to the Burrow (and they had been in no rush), they had called a meeting to summarise the events of their adventure. After finding to their surprise that they had been absent for less than a day — Professor McGonagall had theorised that it had something to do with the "dramatic compression of time necessitated by the medium", but Harry had tuned out — they had explained all about Clough's promise to destroy Voldemort at least twice.

"So we'll head out to kill Voldemort once and for all as soon as we're packed. And Ginny's coming with us."

This didn't get nearly as many objections as he had expected; the meeting disbanded soon afterwards, and he and Ginny were left alone in the kitchen.

Or almost alone. Ron sat there, a thoughtful frown on his face. Something seemed to be eating at him.

"Harry..." he began.

Harry raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Well, you know I don't really mind you and Ginny, y'know... yeah."

"Yeah."

"Just as long as it never, under any circumstances involves any... y'know..."

"I'm getting that impression."

"So... just to help me decide whether or not to belt you one in the teeth — in all friendship, and all that — I was wondering..."

"_What?_"

"Why did you want a locksmith?"

*      *      *

Clough — except he wasn't Clough, was he, not any more — opened the door, stepping into the apartment. It was snowing heavily outside, and through the window he could see dozens of tall buildings, their bright lights shining through the driving snow. On his way here he had seen, shining out into the night from an island in the harbour, a vast statue, thrusting a bronze torch skywards. He didn't know what it was, he just knew that it was familiar.

His feet, similarly, had seemed to guide him to the apartment he had just entered, the old familiar sensation of part of him knowing, another part not knowing, suffusing him. He had got used to it over the past few weeks, which — to his perspective — he had spent jumping from universe to universe. He had no clear memories of any of them. The only thing he remembered with any certainty from those other realities was that what he once considered reality would be a bad place to go back to.

He continued walking through the darkened apartment, when a pair of smooth female arms wrapped around his shoulders.

"Welcome home," a voice breathed from behind him. Somehow, he found himself surprised to hear an English accent, but he pushed it aside.

"Hello, Sara." He turned, not pausing to wonder how he knew her name, or why he seemed to have acquired an American accent. As with knowing where to go, he put it all down to serendipitous chance. "I've had quite a day."

"Oh?" She smiled at him, flirting. The conversation, he somehow knew, really didn't matter. "Jonathan, where have you been, then?"

He knew the answer to that one. Somehow, only one seemed to fit.

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that, technically, is the end. Except that, as in my Peter Pan story, and as done by KSchneyer and in the illustrious footsteps of the Annotated Pratchett Files, I will be adding an extra chapter, a crib sheet, to explain all... most of... well, a few of the jokes and references.
> 
> Anyway, if you enjoyed this story - and I hope you did, of course - please leave a review. Praise or criticism, both are welcome as long as they're coherent and constructive. :-)


	8. Gee Baby Ain't I Good To You: The Crib Sheet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As has become my custom, here's the crib sheet for Hollywood Or What. Missed a joke? Wondered what the hell I was talking about? Found something that sounded like it was supposed to be a reference but couldn't figure out what it was? Well, all shall be revealed.

## 

**Hollywood Or What: The Crib Sheet**

*      *      *

## 

Prologue: Ars Gratia Artis

> _"Tripudo Mundofinitis Sinescutum, nothing else."_

Tripudo — to leap. Mundus — world, universe. Finitimus — adjoining. Sine — without. Scutum — shield. In other words, "leap to an adjacent universe without shields".

> _"...summoned a creature from the dungeon dimensions..."_

The Dungeon Dimensions are a sort of parallel universe from the _Discworld_ novels by Terry Pratchett. They're full of ghasterly creatures with tentacles and things.

> _"Tropdy Mund... Trappo... Tripudo Mundofinitis Sellulosa!" A bright white blast of light launched from his wand, coalescing into a minute, flickering rectangle of glowing silver. [...] "In this dimension, perhaps," he sneered. "Postulo Foris!" [...] The tiny silver rectangle expanded, becoming a flickering, spinning, pulsating letterbox of argent light. [...] And the silver screen closed behind him._

Clough gets it wrong, and says "sellulosa" instead of "sinescutum". Movies are (traditionally) filmed on cellulose film, so the spell ("Summon Gate" and later "Recreate Gate") takes the form of a silver screen. In widescreen — letterbox — format, too... no expense spared!

*      *      *

## 

Episode One: A New Trope

The first chapter becomes an "episode" in homage to the _Star Wars_ films. And of course it's not a New Hope but a new, slightly cliché form...

> _Almost thirty years ago, in a plot device far, far away..._

At the time the HP books are set, _Star Wars_ was released almost thirty years ago...

> _I came here in that thing? Bloody hell, I'm braver than I thought._

Slightly paraphrasing Princess Leia's line on seeing the _Millennium Falcon_.

> _His robes were gone. In their place were quilted, black leather trousers, and all sorts of shiny metal... stuff. That wasn't right... [...] He looked around. In the distance, two men in dark grey uniforms sauntered across a corridor. There was something odd about them... He looked closer, and blinked in surprise when his eyes seemed to zoom in on them._

Yup, Clough's turned into Vader. And I reckoned that suit would have zoom lenses.

> _And when they did, he saw crawling patterns of light blue over them, through them, following their every move. [...] He zoomed out again, looked around; now that he was looking for it, he saw the trickling light everywhere. It rolled across surfaces, bent and curved as people — in strange white and black armour, it seemed — passed through it. It moved as though it were alive. [...] There was something here, something pervading everything, tying it all together._

The Force is described by Kenobi and Yoda as a force pervading everything and everyone, tying everything together. Blind Force-users are in some of the expanded universe sources shown as being able to see through the Force, and it seemed apt for Force-sensitive people to be able to see the Force roiling around...

> _and i can control it_

Darth Clough is being spoken to by the Dark Side. Tempted...

> _The thought popped into his head unbidden, unrecognised. He spotted a polystyrene cup of something on a shelf a short distance away. He reached for it..._

Quite apart from Luke Skywalker's levitating antics, Dark Helmet in _Spaceballs_ drinks coffee out of a polystyrene cup.

> _"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Harry asked the red-haired monstrosity crammed into the compartment with him. It was under the floor of the Centennial Goshawk... [...] It was huge. It was massive. It looked, admittedly, like a hamburger._

The design of the _Millennium Falcon_ was allegedly based on a hamburger. And Ron's been cast as Chewbacca.

> _He opened his eyes, straightened up, looked at the wall. He'd put his shoulder on one of the little levers... or one of the little red buttons. He flicked it back. [...] The ship shuddered slightly as a thundering volley came from outside. [...] Beside the ramp, a long black tubular object was withdrawing back into the ship's hull._

Clough accidentally activated the retractable heavy repeating blaster seen briefly in a couple of the films.

> _"Who's Lord Vader?" [...] "Um..." the ensign looked panicked. "The daddy?"_

I couldn't resist. It's just a little play with the old "Who's the daddy" line.

> _He held his hand up to the man as if to ward him off, and the joker started pretending to choke._

Darth Vader chokes people with the Force. So does Clough, he just doesn't know it.

> _She lay on her side on the uncomfortable bunk, staring at the door, one hand resting on her hip. To an observer, she might have appeared languorous, even seductive, particularly as the spell seemed to have transfigured her training gear into a long white dress that she would reluctantly admit did very flattering things for her figure._

You _have_ seen the film, right?

> _"Aren't you a little thick for a Death Eater?"_

"Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?"

> _"I said, I'm Harry Potter," came the irritated reply. "And I'm here to rescue you."_

"I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm here to rescue you!"

> _They reached the duct sinking into the wall, the discarded grating lying beside it. A tall, gangly creature with pointy, bat-wing ears, platypus face and bulbous eyes stood beside it. [...] "Master Harry, Sir, meesa opened de grate for yousa and de Wheezy! Go quick, big bombin' coming up!" [...] Dob-Dob disappeared with a pop._

Who in the HP canon looks a bit funny and impish and speaks strangely? Right, now who in SW? Yup! Dobby + Jar-Jar = Dob-Dob. (Oh, and I got the basis of this idea from my good friend running_swift, as she never tires of reminding me. ;-)

> _It came to him in a flash. ("Ow," said the nearby Crewman Wilhelm, blinking his eyes against the green afterimage on his retina.) A spell that he should have thought of earlier. A spell from his school days. ("Wooaaaaaaaaggghhh!" screamed the crewman as he stumbled blindly into, and subsequently — inevitably — down, a nearby lift shaft.)_

Here I'm just being silly; the literary device ("came to him in a flash") manifests physically in the story's world, blinding a crewman. And as he plummets to his doom, he produces the Wilhelm Scream, a famous sound effect recorded by Sheb Wooley in the fifties and subsequently used in a great number of films (and specifically in just about every film where Ben Burtt's done the sound design).

> _Even the italics that normally imbued the incantation with its power failed to appear._

Just a quick play with the HP convention of denoting spells with italics, affecting the conceit that it's the italics that actually give them their power. Silly, I know, but I couldn't resist.

> _A glaring blade of angry red light sprang from the end, but stopped a mere yard out. That was odd in itself. He knew of very few spells that would stop after such a short distance, and fewer still that he could competently cast. He waggled the curious wand experimentally; it sliced through the air with a throbbing hum. He looked closer at it._

Whummm.... The wand's turned into a lightsabre. As if you hadn't guessed.

> _I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some trouble about that, he thought._

A quote from John Cleese's masterpiece "How To Irritate People", where he — as an airline captain — has accidentally caused all the passengers to jump out.

> _Two more corners, and a deranged scream came towards him. Then a flood of white-armoured figures rounded the corner, screeched to a halt, and stared at him. They seemed to have been fleeing. [...] Another figure [...] rounded the corner, screaming at the top of his lungs, only to skid to a halt as he realised that his quarry had stopped._

Spoofs the scene on the Death Star where Han Solo, by virtue of volume alone, manages to chase a whole squad of Stormtroopers.

> _...perhaps the curious dog-leg design of their bulky metal wands affected their marksmanship rather more than it should..._

Seriously. Has a Stormtrooper _ever_ managed to hit anything on the first try?

> _...not the sharpest athame in the box..._

An _athame_ is a type of knife primarily associated with real witchcraft, Wicca and so on.

> _...if the ship managed to leave the— space station? Moon? He wasn't sure._

"That's no moon. That's a space station." Simple enough reference.

> _He jumped, knowing he'd never make it. [...] boinga-boinga-boinga upsidaisy_

In the later films, Jedis have a habit of making implausibly high leaps. Here Clough gets a spot of help from the Dark Side of the Force.

> _And something wondered where its champion had gone. [...] With the painfully bright glare gone, the hangar somehow felt a little on the dark side._

"Something," of course, is the Force. The, um, Dark Side of the Force. I couldn't resist.

*      *      *

## 

Chapter II: Noe #xDE;e Olde Wimple-eth Fore Me-eth

The phrase "Ye Olde" stems from a common misinterpretation of the old English letter thorn (#xDE;) which in its lower-case form (#xFE;) can be written to look very similar to a letter y. So here it is with an actual #xDE;. And a wimple is the pointy, lace-bedecked hat that Disney princesses always wear.

> _It was raining heavily. [...] "Well, at least we're in England."_

A cheap shot, but I'm English. I'm allowed.

> _Ginny pulled out her mobile phone._

Hollywood films always contain lots of anachronisms, continuity errors and whatnot. This one's deliberate.

> _She glanced down at the luxurious calico dress she was wearing, the white blouse welling out over the laced bodice. "Well, shouldn't we be able to tell from our clothes, then?"_

That's a wench dress, that sort of dress that every single barmaid ever to feature in a period film has worn. Even if it was only used for a couple of chunks of the 18th and 19th centuries, Hollywood costume designers put them in every single film because they reckon they'll draw the male audiences by virtue of the dresses being rather flattering to certain shapes. They're not wrong.

> _[The lance] had gone through the driver, skewering him to the carriage. [...] He'd known Crafty Robert — K-Bob for short — for years._

Sheesh. Poor old K-Bob. Yub, he's been kebabbed.

> _A tall, thin figure dressed entirely in black, with lank black hair and a hawk nose stalked round from the other side of the wreck. He had the kind of walk that suggested a theme tune; indeed, as he strode, an ominous, regular, martially pounding melody seemed to drift with him, long mellow minor tones of strings and brass. There was something familiar about him._

Alan Rickman played Snape in HP; he also played the Sheriff of Nottingham in _Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves_. And his theme tune here is the Imperial March from _Star Wars_. And of course Harry recognises him.

> _He peered closer, glaring intently at Harry's face. His eyes seemed to flicker to his forehead. [...] "Don't I know you?" [...] Harry gulped. "No?" [...] "You're not famous?" [...] "Only very slightly." [...] "An extra tax on our little celebrity for trying to be clever."_

The Sheriff appears to recognise Harry — that's why he glances at his forehead, for the scar. And of course a quick reference to the "our new... celebrity" line.

> _"A little dance, a little love. Sunshine. Moonlight. Good times. Boogie. What we all want." He returned his gaze to the watch and mumbled, almost inaudibly, "and shedloads of money, of course."_

Three references in that little bit: _Get Down Tonight_ by K C &amp; The Sunshine Band; _Blame It On The Boogie_ by the Jackson Five; and "We're talking about a [shed]load of money!" line from Mel Brooks' classic _Spaceballs_.

> _"Be sure to save your money, Mr Kodak..."_

Kinda obscure here. Paparazzi use cameras. Kodak make film for cameras. Paparazzi go after new... celebrities.

> _"The hobbehods!"_

Robin Hood and his Merry Men were also known as "hobbehods"...

> _"Sir?" asked a soldier quietly. "Your theme?" [...] "Thugger the beam!" the sheriff snarled back. He caught himself. "I mean, bugger the... oh, just go."_

Wait, what's this? The Sheriff knows he's followed around by a theme tune? Wonder why... Oh, and he has a speech impediment, just like in _Prince of Thieves_ and _Men In Tights_.

> _"Scathlock," the man drawled in an accent that a distant part of Harry's brain recognised as American, "Will Scathlock."_

"Scathlock" is alleged to be Will Scarlet's real name. And in _Men In Tights_ he's shown as Will Scarlett O'Hara... from Georgia.

> _"We are the Merry Men of Robin Hood!" He caught Harry's look, and added hurriedly: "No, don't worry, we're straight. Just... merry."_

A direct reference to the explanation following Mel Brooks' "Feygeles?" line in _Men In Tights_.

> _Five men — mostly men, anyway — stood there, trying to hold a number of instruments as nonchalantly as possible. One was sitting on his cello, whistling and trying to project an air of absolute innocence. Harry goggled at them for a moment before he found his voice. [...] "And who the hell are you?"_

Oh look! A band following the sheriff around!

> _"Meet Robin of Locksley!" [...] "G'day, sport. How the bloody 'ell are ya?" [...] The corks dangling from Robin's cap were distracting him._

Robin Hood's Australian. Obviously. Well, it's not as silly as it sounds. Mel Gibson (who buggers British history on a regular basis) counts as Australian, Kevin Costner (who played Robin Hood) isn't English, and Errol Flynn, who starred in one of the quintessential film versions, was born in Tasmania.

> _He sighed, as if he was trying to speak to a Frenchman on a package holiday. He spoke slowly... and... LOUDLY. [...] (It always works. Or at least, British tourists think it does.)_

This is the traditional British approach to foreign languages. Visiting France and don't speak the lingo? Don't worry! Everyone speaks and understands English as long as you speak LOUDLY AND SLOWLY.

> _"That's Friar Tuck? He runs the tuck shop along with our other man of the bloody cloth, the chip monk over there?" He pointed to a grey-robed figure almost hidden behind a bank of serving counters._

A tuck shop is a small shop, generally found in British schools open at breaktimes to sell sweets and things. And of course, with the chip monk doing the chips, that would make Tuck the fish friar...

> _"Big Steve, our resident bloody strongman?" He pointed to a man who couldn't have been more than four foot tall, though it was entirely possible that his bushy blond beard was considerably longer. The man produced something between a snarl and a laugh — what Harry had to assume was his idea of a friendly "howareyou" — and raised the mug in his left hand. His right kept a firm hold on a six-foot quarterstaff with a vicious-looking axe head at the end._

Little John was huge. So why not make him a Tolkienesque dwarf... and call him Big Steve? (By the way, Big Steve used to play the trombone with Jazz P'zazz, a local trad jazz band I used to jam with.) Anyway, I based Big Steve mainly on John Rhys-Davies' version of Gimli.

> _"Scumble?" [...] "The local brew? It's made from apples?" He seemed to catch himself. "Well, mostly bloody apples?"_

Scumble, in the _Discworld_ books, is a highly alcoholic drink brewed from apples. Well, mostly apples.

> _"Why do you talk like that? Turning everything into a question?"_

The "High Rising Terminal" — commonly known as the Australian Question Intonation — is a feature common to Australian accents, where every sentence ends up sounding like a question. There's a clip of Stephen Fry banishing it into _Room 101_ on YouTube, if anyone's interested.

> _"Oh, that's John Fred? And his bloody playboys? They're no bloody use? First sign of a wimple an' they'll bugger off?"_

John Fred &amp; His Playboy Band were a rock &amp; roll band in the late fifties, who despite being rather good ended up as a one-hit wonder with _Judy In Disguise_. The implication in the joke, by the way, is that, being playboys, they'll chase after anything in skirts and thus won't be around for the battle.

> _"They're me bloody trophies? I just got this one —" he pointed "— at a competition last week? I was down in Tumba-bloody-Rumba shootin' kanga-bloody-roos?"_

"Down in Tumba-bloody-Rumba shooting kanga-bloody-roos" is a line from a famous old Australian poem parodying the Australian habit of tmesis (interjecting one word into another).

> _"Friar Tuck tried a new experiment tonight, and it had a few fairly nasty side effects on Robin, so he needs to sit out the attack on the castle. [...] And a word to the wise... don't try the deep-fried Mars Bars."_

Deep-fried Mars bars are a Scottish... um... delicacy. Take one Mars bar. Dip in batter. Drop in the deep frier until cooked. Avoid.

> _Oh god, Harry thought, we really are in a film._

Seriously. When did John McClane last have a plan?

> _...before being captured she'd had the foresight to tuck the wand in her hair as a hairpin._

This is a subtle reference to Hu Li's hairpin trick in _Rush Hour 2_, where she ties her hair back with a fancy spinny one-handed trick. It looks immensely cool. So why can't Ginny hide her wand that way?

> _She pointed her wand at the door. "Aloho... No. Reducto Praejudi Extremis."_

Why unlock a door when you can blow it up? _Reducto_... with extreme prejudice.

> _There, encircling her, were two bands of gleaming metal; one high, one low. They were joined by a length of chain, from which dangled a heavy-looking padlock. Two rivets and the horizontal keyhole gave it the look of a face — and, with the leer it wore, an altogether too smug expression. [...] "It's a chastity bra," Ginny explained._

This is a reference to the chastity belt Maid Marion's fitted with in _Men In Tights_, though slightly expanded. And rather more animated. Plus, I thought it would be amusing for animate underwear to be somewhat lecherous. As far as that bra's concerned, he's got his dream job...

> _"My mother had it fitted the moment I grew out of my old pyjamas." [...] "Wait a minute," Harry mused. "That can't be right, we're in the wrong fic for that!"_

If you haven't read Sovran's _The Meaning Of One_, do so. As soon as you've finished this, obviously.

> _"Not an..." A thought struck him. "Have you seen the inside of her wrist recently?" [...] "Why?" [...] "Just a thought."_

Ginny's mum reckons she'll never have any reason to be rid of the device. Harry reckons that's a bit cruel, and so suspects she may have a Dark Mark...

> _"Hang on..." Ginny posited thoughtfully. "The traditional reasoning is that somewhere, someone who is destined to be my one true love has a key that will fit the lock."_

That's the plan in _Men In Tights_, and Harry's reaction is pretty much my own.

> _And so, outside the castle, echoing far and wide, went up the cry: [...] "CALL A LOCKSMITH!"_

Direct reference to _Men In Tights_. Watch the film. You know you want to.

> _"We found a witch, Prince Clough! May we burn 'er?" [...] "A witch!" the second guard, Moth, added excitedly. The third one, subscribing to the philosophy of always being prepared, scurried up carrying a duck._

Moth is Don Armado's valet in Shakespeare's _Love's Labours Lost_. And the witch thing is a reference to _Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail_.

> _None of the three had much chance to say any more, for behind Scruffins stood a very short, very bearded, very strong man with a very big axe. It had much of the door stuck on it. [...] "Here's Stevie!" the beast rumbled._

A quick reference to Jack Nicholson's ad-libbed "Here's Johnny!" line in Stanley Kubrick's _The Shining_.

*      *      *

## 

Interlude: Back To Reality? 

> _Apart from anything else, the ground was covered with a thick layer of snow. [...] Dumbledore's tomb was gone._

Yup, it's a few years earlier. That's all.

> _"Curiouser and curiouser," he muttered._

A line from _Alice In Wonderland_ (but don't ask me which of the books). I just like it. You'll see it again in the next chapter.

> _...they saw hundreds of students in elegant robes. No, not robes — gowns. They were open at the front, showing elegant but in many cases distinctly muggle clothes beneath. A few of the older students even wore muggle dinner jackets, with their robes draped casually over one shoulder._

A common criticism levelled against the films is that the clothes are more akin to muggle academic dress than the "robes" referred to in the books.

*      *      *

## 

Level 3: The Catacombs Of Kekarce

Since this is largely a computer game parody, it's not a chapter — it's a level. Catacombs sounded about right. And "Kekarce" if pronounced correctly, is a homophone for "kick-arse", which of course is what Ginny does in this chapter.

> _L O A D I N G . . . _

Start a new level, you get a loading screen. I never said these references were complicated.

> _Her... how shall I put this... Well, she could no longer see her feet. Her view downwards was, shall we say, pectorally obscured. A quick rummage around beyond visual range, and she found that her clothing had once again changed, her wench dress replaced by... she wasn't too sure. Some ugly turquoise thing, anyway, and brown shorts that ended almost before her legs had a chance to start, and a bit further down... what the hell were those... [...] Her fingers met cold steel and polished leather, which she somehow knew was laminated over form-pressed thermo-plastic... A smirk crossed her face._

Ginny's been physically transformed, to fit the Lara Croft character. And she's got guns.

> _Guns akimbo, with a predatory grin across her face, Ginny loped off after him._

Based on Lara's run animation in the original _Tomb Raider_.

> _At the moment, it was whizzing past him at exceedingly high speeds. Like his seat, this was not in itself a bad thing; on a broom, not that he remembered brooms, he would have thoroughly enjoyed himself. In this rusting, careening mine cart, it was less pleasant._

Spoofing the mine cart chase in _Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom_.

> _He grabbed a rock from the cart, hefted it in his hand, and flung it at the lever. It missed. [...] With mere seconds to spare, he hurled a second rock; this time, it hit its mark. [...] The points ground into their second position..._

In _Temple_, Indiana Jones throws a rock or something to switch the points over. Or Luke Skywalker throws a skull to close a door in _Return of the Jedi_. Or I might just be imagining the whole thing.

> _...clamping his battered brown fedora down on his head..._

Battered brown fedora. Revolver. Kangaroo-hide whip. Of course he's Indiana Jones.

> _"I'm gonna die, oh god, oh god, I'm gonna die, I'm toast, I'm gonna die," he chanted to himself through clenched teeth._

Based on Rincewind's "Stercus stercus stercus, morituri sum" line in a couple of the _Discworld_ books.

> _He staggered up the rocky beach and sank down on a smooth boulder. He planted the now battered and wet fedora on his head and fished in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He wasn't sure why — he couldn't remember ever smoking the things — but it seemed the right thing to do._

Any time someone's been in a stressful situation in a certain vintage of action film, they have a fag. It's the law.

> _(You bloody didn't. You said "a passage leading upwards". That's what I signed on for. Not a bloody temple. Temples are full of traps and things. I've already been half killed today, I don't want to finish the job. —Harry) [...] (Just get on with it, or I'll write in a great white shark, too. /Torak)_

I thought Harry might want a say in the story... and to be fair I hadn't _really_ been entirely up-front with him, had I?

> _He edged forward, and soon found its associated body. It lay several yards forward, and had clearly been decapitated with some force. Harry stepped slowly forward, approaching the skeleton, and noticed a disturbance in the air ahead of him._

This whole scene refers to the humility test in _Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade_...

> _(What's your point? The first person down that corridor always dies. That's how the audience knows it's dangerous, so they'll be more impressed when the hero manages to... Oh. /Torak)_

...and that refers to the fact that before Indy goes in, they send in one of the flunkies to be decapitated, so the viewers can be impressed.

> _(Oh, fine. Whining little bugger, moaning about a little scratch... /Torak)_

It's a stretch, I know, but I was actually thinking of the _Holy Grail_ scene with the Black Knight when I wrote this. "'Tis but a scratch!"

> _He stood, dusting himself off, and continued carefully onwards to the temple. [...] The temple of DOOOOM! BWAHAHAHAAAA!_

Really, I need to explain this? _Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom_, Harry's irrational fear of temples, me being evil?

> _She reached for the altar and grabbed the brass key lying on it..._

Have you ever noticed in computer games that people leave keys, guns, first aid kits and vital equipment just lying around? Either just lying around or perched on altars or under spotlights that just scream "Pick me up and you'll be surrounded by imps".

> _The downwards stairs had crumbled long ago, and the shaft descended into thick darkness. Far above, a speck of light suggested that somewhere, the surface still existed — not that the staircase led that far. She took the stairs two at a time, climbing up to the next level at a brisk clip._

If a computer game wants to create the impression of size and openness, but doesn't want you to be able to get there, that's what it does. "Yup, there were stairs... but they're gone." And of course, she climbs to the next _level_...

> _...the great temple of Molteplexl, where the god of light and shadow..._

Cinema works by manipulating light and shadow... and Molteplexl is an Aztecised version of "multiplex", which of course is a type of cinema...

> _...and with a great SLAM, a solid slab of rock dropped through a slot in the ceiling, fracturing flagstones and effectively blocking her return. There was no turning back now._

Oh look, you've passed the autosave point, and we don't want you to go back and pick up the powerups you forgot. Let's collapse the tunnel.

> _She lined up her next jump, retired to the edge of the column to afford some degree of acceleration, and leapt once more; again, the leap offered little trouble. She continued the same way until she was only two platforms from the far side._

I never really played any of the _Tomb Raider_ games, because platform games (that aren't _Super Mario World_) really, _really_ annoy me... Jumping from implausible platform to implausible platform... urgh. And then you plummet to your death. Why bother?

> _And so, with a muffled but curiously sensual "oof" and a wet, conclusive thud, Ginny Weasley died._

What can I say? I thought it would be amusing to kill Ginny now that she had quickloads available... Oh, and the "curiously sensual oof" refers to the sound effects of the early _Tomb Raider_ games, which were renowned for being... well, overly enthusiastic, shall we say.

> _The noise was getting louder, and was now clearly coming from somewhere behind him. [...] Then, swinging into the corridor from a curved side passage, a vast spherical boulder rolled into sight._

Opening scene of _Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark_. Indy gets chased by a MAHOOSIVE boulder. So does Harry.

> _He ran for the light, ducking storms of poison darts..._

In the same scene, Indy gets pelted with lots of poison darts... which is bad news for Harry.

> _He ... fell to the ground just as two racks of razor-sharp spikes swung across the corridor_

Oh, and look! The spike traps are here too! Sorry, Harry...

> _She blinked. The world faded into view before her, and she found herself once again standing, feet squarely on the ground, shoulder blades to the solid stone door, at the entrance to the vast cavern..._

That's what happens when you reload a level. It fades in, and there you are.

> _Something was wrong with the rock walls of the rift. They seemed to shift as she moved her head; she experimentally shuffled sideways several feet, and true enough — a bar across the yawning gap moved differently from the rock around it. ... There was a bridge across, cunningly camouflaged to be invisible in the eternal twilight of the cavern._

Refers to the "leap of faith" camouflaged bridge in _Last Crusade_.

> _She drew a small sandbag from her backpack_

Whaddya know, Indy's sandbag from the idol scene at the start of _Raiders_ is here too!

> _Suddenly, three reptilian creatures, bounding on their hind legs, burst from the shadows and ran towards her, beady eyes burning, teeth glittering._

Lara Croft has a nasty habit of being attacked by packs of three velociraptors. This is generally considered bad for your health.

> _She drew the long, Teflon-coated combat knife bolted to the shroud of one of her holsters._

That's a simple reference to the Safariland 6004 holster I have for my airsoft SWAT gear. It holds a Sig P226, an expandable baton on the front, and a Cold Steel SRK on the back. So pretty.

> _A bricked-up shopfront burst open, and a vast reptilian monster emerged. Its head alone was longer than Ginny was tall, its vestigial forelegs carried razor-sharp claws, and it crunched lazily out onto the concourse on its massive rear legs._

Tyrannosaurs also seem to be rather keen on eating poor ol' Lara. Whoops.

> _The floor was highly-polished obsidian, as were the walls; a thick layer of dust coated everything, though through it gleamed the rich gold of... well, gold. It was everywhere. Railings, decorations, furniture — all golden. The beam of light from her torch went passed from gold object to gold object, each grander than the next._

Yup, it's an ancient cinema. Shiny, black, gloss, gold, gaudy, tasteless.

> _Harry was lost. He'd stumbled around the temple for what felt like hours, and got more and more confused. There had been side temples, ranging from small chambers to large halls, all with rows of stone pews facing a blank and whitewashed wall. Each temple had an ornate pulpit at the very back, sometimes in a booth of its own. But none of them had held Clough._

Cinema turned to religion, with lots of little side cinemas.

> _The inner sanctum was huge. Not as large as the cavern outside, but large nevertheless; a quick glance at the pews suggested that it could have seated several hundred people, if not a thousand. A second glance revealed that there was a second level, a sort of balcony, which presumably could seat several hundred more. [...] The sanctum was, although Ginny could not know it, much like the smaller chapels Harry had seen, though on a much grander scale. The pews were coated in a reddish slime, which on closer inspection proved to be the mouldering remains of deep red upholstery. The floor sloped gently downwards, interrupted here and there by low steps, each adorned with an edge of pure gold. [...] At the front was a stage, and from a hemispherical pit in front of it came a flickering yellow glow, as though someone were standing in the pit with a candle._

See? That's a cinema too!

> _There, above her, hung the largest chandelier she had ever seen, thousands of long-dry oil lamps bedecking a vast frame of rusty iron and dusty gold._

You've got to have a chandelier in a theatre. It's the law.

> _In the fraction of a second before he reached the apex of his leap, and the downwards plummet to the floor thirty feet below that would inevitably follow, his arm shot out, and the lash of the whip uncoiled at supersonic speed._

It's a law. You have a chandelier, you've got to swing from it. And swinging from a kangaroo-hide whip is what Indy does best.

*      *      *

## 

Chapter Four: Shades Of Gray

Shades of grey refers to ethical shades, and of course to the genre — which is traditionally presented in black and white. You'll notice as well that the chapter is (with some judicious exceptions, which do have a point) written in American English.

> _My eyes flickered open, and were met — as usual — by the drab gray ceiling of my office. Heavy rain spattered on the window, the sodium lights outside casting gray bands of light through the blinds. [...] A job where everything goes in gray, where greenbacks are dark gray and whiskey bottles almost black._

And that's keeping it up — you'll note throughout the chapter that all the normally colourful things (garish ties, sodium streetlights, dollar notes, blood) are greys.

> _My life was as it always had been... [...] ...I just couldn't remember if it had always been like that yesterday._

That refers to a query often voiced in Terry Pratchett's books; "That shop? That's always been there." "Yeah, but Sarge... had it always been there yesterday?" You'll notice also, by the way, that the "real" Harry has been pushed to the back, and he's been absorbed fully into the genre. That's why the _noir_ Harry keeps hearing voices in his head.

> _What started it all was, of course, a dame. It's always a dame. This one was better-looking than most; cute face, not as tall as she looked, great figure with curves in all the right places, and dressed real expensive in a white satin dress, with..._

That describes just about every femme fatale ever written.

> _She had red hair. Red hair and red lips. That was wrong, that was physically impossible... red was a color, and color didn't exist. For that matter, how the hell did I know what red was?_

Black and white. Monochrome. Greyscale. Add a dash of red to that, and it works really well. It's also a nice touch.

> _It showed a rough-looking cat in a pinstriped suit, sucking on a fag... [...] ...wait a minute, that sounded wrong... [...] ...smoking a cigarette._

Again, I couldn't resist. I'm just mucking about with linguistic differences — as someone said (Churchill, was it?) America and England are two countries divided by a common language. A fag, in English, is a cigarette.

> _He looked a mean piece of work, pinched face and bulbous eyes shaded under a battered fedora._

Clough, here, is described to appear superficially similar to Peter Lorre, an actor who tended to appear in just about every _film noir_ of the forties and fifties. Great at playing creepy characters.

> _I sank onto my couch opposite her as she sat down and crossed... oh God, crossed her legs... crossed her legs..._

Just a quick little reference to _that_ scene with Sharon Stone in _Basic Instinct_. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not going to tell you about it.

> _"Van Wezel. Ginny van Wezel."_

They're always "van" or "la" or "de", aren't they? And "Wezel" is "weasel" in Dutch.

> _"He works for a shady character called Thomas De Mort."_

Thomas... Tom. De Mort. Tom De Mort... Tom Riddle, Voldemort. Need I say more?

> _Are you stupid as well as deaf? Her fianc#xE9; has your name! Does that not strike you as odd at all? [...] Something about the guy's name struck me as odd, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The headache was starting to fade, and I was starting to tune out that irritating, nagging buzz at the back of my mind._

That's the real Harry, trying to break through, and get _noir_ Harry to understand what's going on.

> _I needed a drink. I needed life insurance. I needed a vacation. I needed a house in the country. What I had was a hat, a coat, and a gun. I put them on and headed out._

An slightly tweaked direct quote from Raymond Chandler's _Farewell My Lovely_

> _Suddenly there was a tremendous crash as the front door burst open. I looked up to find myself staring down the barrels of a couple of police .38 specials._

One of Raymond Chandler's laws of writing was "When in doubt, have two men with guns kick the door down." You'll see that theme recur a couple of times, with variations...

> _One was short and scrawny, and, when he eventually spoke, spoke in a high, squeaky voice. The other... well, I had to assume he was human, because he was the right size (more or less) to fit in his uniform, he walked on two legs, and to the best of my knowledge there's no such thing as trolls._

The cops are a double reference. They're primarily based on Bluebottle and Eccles from _The Goon Show_, but also of course Nobby and Colon from Terry Pratchett's _Discworld_ series.

> _"I'm not the guy you're looking for." [...] "You're not the guy we're looking for?" Zog asked. "We're not looking for anyone... yet." [...] "I can go about my business." I waved my hand vaguely in front of him; I'm not sure why. [...] "You have business?" [...] "Move along." [...] "OK," Zog sighed. "Move along."_

This is a pretty close rip of Ben Kenobi's "These are not the droids you are looking for" spiel from _Star Wars_ \- except that there's no Force, no magic, and it's working only because the copper can't be buggered.

> _"Say hi to McGinty when he gets here."_

McGinty's is in the sitcom _Frasier_ the name of the bar Frasier Crane's father, a retired cop, frequents.

> _"Say, Steve, what time is it?"_

This entire exchange is copied almost word for word from the famous "What Time Is It, Eccles" conversation in Spike Milligan's classic Goon Show episode, "_The Mysterious Punch-Up-The-Conker_".

> _During that interlude I'd had time to drive to Green Street, where this De Mort guy was supposed to live._

Sydney Greenstreet is an actor who tends to crop up, like Peter Lorre, in all those forties thrillers.

> _I reached for the cloth to see if it was the guy who'd been following the broad, but just as I was about to yank it off, the side door bust open and two guys charged in._

When in doubt...

> _"What'd Killer Joe catch you for, man?" the black guy asked amiably, as if he was just passing the time. [...] "Jack McGuffin," he said. "They call me 'Brother Jack'."_

"Brother" Jack McDuff was one of the jazz/funk/R&amp;B greats, master of the Hammond organ. And he had a tune called "Killer Joe".

> _"Sheeyut, man, these suckers use standard police cuffs! Interchangeable keys!" He fidgeted behind his back for a few seconds, and then his hands emerged unshackled. A shiny silver key was in his hand. "I always carry one with me."_

It always bothered me in films that people always have to hunt around for someone with the right key — but most real handcuffs have more or less identical keys. I carry one on my keyring all the time.

> _I looked up. There were three of them this time, in defiance of tradition, and almost as if they were deliberately trying to flout Chandler's Law, all three were women. Very definitely women. With guns. And just to instill terror in the hearts of men, one of them had a Tommy gun, and she held it like someone who knows how to use it. [...] "Charlie? We're all done here. Yeah, we're heading back to the agency. Yeah, we'll see... well, hear from you then."_

It's the old "when in doubt" law again — but with three women instead of two men. Simple, really, with the added quirk that they are, of course, Charlie's Angels. That's why they'll hear from Charlie instead of seeing him.

> _"Is the guy bonkers?" I heard Clough ask..._

Just a small touch to emphasise that Clough is still British, and hasn't been affected by the spell as much as the "passengers".

> _"Better back off a bit, Miss." I raised the gun again and drew a bead on the padlock, squeezing off a round into it. It ricocheted off the heavy steel, tearing a ragged hole in the floorboards by my feet._

In films, it's really easy to shoot out padlocks. In real life, it ain't. Have a Google for The Box O' Truth for more.

> _"Sure, kids. Whatever you say." He nudged me in the ribs. "She deserves a nice room and some supper, fella."_

A slightly adjusted quote from President Bartlet in the first-season _West Wing_ episode "_Five Votes Down_", from a scene where he passes a couple of kitchen staff getting friendly in a corridor as his entourage passes.

> _"Voldepillock's scary when he's waving a wand about, but he can barely cross a room on foot."_

Drawing a similarity here between Voldemort and the Daleks. Violent, potent firepower, but not that great at mobility.

> _The world stopped. [...] Everything went black, a strange flapping sound fading away with the last of the light._

Remember film projectors? Those 8mm things with reels that your teachers used to drag out to show you rubbish educational cartoons? That sound is what would happen at the end of the reel, when the film detaches from the first reel and starts flapping around.

> _Then there was an odd sensation, like a perspective shifting, as though I were suddenly someone else, outside myself, a dispassionate observer of my own personal epic._

As the film ends, the genre shifts, the first-person perspective demanded by convention shifts as well.

> _...out of some last nod to convention, a low blue light faded out of nowhere, not really doing anything other than illuminating the darkness so they could see it better. [...] "I don't know why," Harry muttered slowly, "but I've got this strange feeling that I should have a sheet around my waist." [...] "Or an ice pick," Ginny added wryly, though she was not sure why._

No scene is ever completely dark in film; even at the dead of night, there will be a blue light coming in through the window. If a man and a woman are in bed together, the sheets will always be L-shaped; it'll go up to the neck on the woman, but only to the waist on the man. And an ice pick featured heavily in _Basic Instinct_.

> _...his trenchcoat ... was a rather unflattering chocolatey brown that he for some reason he couldn't quite put his finger on found oddly appealing..._

I wonder... who do we know with chocolate-brown eyes?

> _...horcruces..._

Yes, I _know_. But Rowling's plural is ugly. Using a latin-based conjugation is much more elegant.

> _He was interrupted as the vast blackness behind them burst silently to life, a bright white rectangle appearing out of nowhere. It was marked with a circle and divided into rectangular quarters much like the crosshairs of a... whatever it was. It flickered, rotating sectors counting out the seconds as they ticked by, marked by occasional ephemeral sigils. [...] The vast ticking icon continued flickering, now throwing building-sized numbers into the centre of the crosshairs._

You don't see it much these days, but remember the good old days, when films used to start with that countdown? That's what they're seeing.

> _"_Practical Ostiomancy and Isolocal Applications_, seventh-year Arithmancy! It's all based on Al-Khwarizmi's Vermicular Tunneler."_

Ostium — entrance, door. So Ostiomancy — the summoning of doors. Isolocal — "same place" (the allusion being that the place is the same, just a different dimension. And "Al-Khwarizmi" is believed to be the Arabic phrase from which our modern word "algorithm" is derived. Oh, and "vermicular tunneler" alludes to a magical wormhole.

> _...standard Hawking magorithms._

Refers to Stephen Hawking and magorithms — magical algorithms.

> _"Postulo Foris Origo."_

"Summon a gate to the origin."

> _The beam this time was different, a tight lance of light that focussed on a point before them, then widened and spread as the portal opened. Ginny lowered her wand, but the flickering pyramid of light remained; for a moment, out of the corner of his eye, Harry imagined he could hear and see a boxy, clattering shadow linger in the air at its apex..._

Here the wand, the beam and the screen approximate, closer than ever, the effect you'd get from a slightly old-style film projector.

> _(A moment later, in a flare of grand, orchestral diegesis, because the universe loves a joke as much as anyone, the music swelled, heralding the start of a new tale — Hollywood Or What II: The Revenge Of Clough.)_

No, there won't be a sequel. It just amused me.

*      *      *

## 

Epilogue: That's All, Fawkes

Th-th-that's all, folks!

> _...below the ruined abbey in a small village named Kirkpevril._

Kirkpevril — Church of the Peverells. It seemed apt.

> _"I'll be back." [...] The great oak doors, which had stood for almost eight centuries, erupted into splinters. In a cloud of smoke and dust, an angry, snarling beast of chrome and deep red metal skidded into the chamber, mere feet in front of Voldemort. [...] It was a large motorcycle. It skidded round almost 180 degrees to face in the general direction of the door._

If Arnold Schwarzenegger says "I'll be back", you just _know_ he's about to come smashing in through the door/wall/roof with a really big vehicle. That's how these things work.

> _"If he hadn't got the girl he would surely not have returned, my Lord. ..." [...] "Very well," Voldemort muttered. "And don't call me Shirley," he added, though he could not for the life of him tell why._

The film world's still leaking through a tiny bit, so Voldemort's channelling Leslie Nielsen in _Airplane!_

  


> _Somehow ... he had acquired a set of dark glasses that now covered his eyes, concealing any flicker of emotion that might once have resided there. [...] He drew a heavy-looking lever-action shotgun from a pannier on the bike and spun it round his hand, cocking it. Somehow, the move — which should by rights have broken his knuckles — instead ended with the gun aimed squarely between Voldemort's eyes. [...] "Hasta la vista, Voldy."_

Yes, he's emulating the Terminator.

> _The gun fired, with a thunderclap like a cross between a cannon and the end of the world._

The sound effect for the Terminator's shotgun was composed of, amongst other things, a recording of a cannon firing.

> _The drops of gore and shreds of flesh were rolling across the ground, coalescing and joining, all heading for Voldemort's lifeless cadaver._

The T-1000, from _Terminator 2_, reforms the same way when destroyed.

> _Slowly, shakily, Voldemort stood, his head lolling to one side; the force of the shotgun slug impacting his face had shattered several vertebrae in his neck. He rolled his head lazily, a bony crumbling sound as his spine healed itself. He stood for a moment, face turned towards the ground, eyes closed as the final pieces of flesh slotted into place._

And here, Voldemort pulls himself together in a manner not dissimilar to Arnold Vosloo's mummy in, unsurprisingly, _The Mummy_.

> _He was pushing before him what looked like a muggle office chair, with a television and a large quantity of modelling clay attached to the seat with sellotape. [...] Clough ... raised a foot and kicked the chair towards Voldemort, a mad smile creasing his face. Strange and unfamiliar thoughts hurtled through his increasingly schizophrenic mind, and it may have been one of them that made him grasp for a suitable phrase to utter. [...] "Yippie-ki-yay, mother Hubbard," he spat, wandlessly blasting a hex towards the chair._

In _Die Hard_, John McClane straps a monitor and a bunch of C4 to an office chair and kicks it down a lift shaft, blowing up a whole pile of stuff. And Clough's line is based, with a slight modification for humorous effect, on McClane's famous line.

> _Professor McGonagall had theorised that it had something to do with the "dramatic compression of time necessitated by the medium"_

A basic premise of film is that timeframes will generally have to be compressed. You don't follow the protagonist all the way to the airport, waiting in the lounge, onto the plane and so on — you just cut to him leaving the airport at the other end.

> _It was snowing heavily outside, and through the window he could see dozens of tall buildings, their bright lights shining through the driving snow. On his way here he had seen, shining out into the night from an island in the harbour, a vast statue, thrusting a bronze torch skywards. He didn't know what it was, he just knew that it was familiar._

He's in New York. I wonder if that'll be significant.

> _"Welcome home," a voice breathed from behind him. Somehow, he found himself surprised to hear an English accent, but he pushed it aside. [...] "Hello, Sara." [...] "Jonathan, where have you been, then?"_

Sara and Jonathan, played by Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack respectively, are the protagonists of one of my favourite films. It's not really that good from an objective point of view, but I always enjoy it. Nice and light and fluffy.

> _As with knowing where to go, he put it all down to serendipitous chance._

Oh, and it's called _Serendipity_. What? Too obvious?

> _The conversation, he somehow knew, really didn't matter._

Traditional wisdom in screenwriting says "show, don't tell". The same applies to writing dialogue; the actual words don't really matter, it's the subtext that plays.

> _"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."_

Rhett Butler's line from _Gone With The Wind_ is possibly the most famous movie quote ever, and so ideal to end the story on. Right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How about that, then? A full, detailed summary of all the little in-jokes, references and whatnot in the story. It's a public service I provide, really. Edutainment for the masses!  
> Or something.


End file.
